He will commit the ultimate crime to capture it… One day, he gets the scent of a young virgin and knows that it is a smell of perfection. Yet through his perfumery and passion for scent, Grenouille truly lives.ĭespite his success, Grenouille isn’t happy he is looking for that one sublimely unique odour that will create the ultimate perfume. He survives on the outskirts of society and uses the bare minimum of social interaction in order to get by. Grenouille graduates from a lowly tanner’s assistant to a perfumer’s apprentice, utilising his skills to create the finest fragrances in Paris. We learn that he has the most powerful sense of smell of any human, able to differentiate between scents from miles away with ease, including the ability to unravel each tiny dimension and element. There’s something unusual about Grenouille. He is easily overlooked and discarded, yet quietly feared.
Throughout childhood, he leads a loveless, friendless and subservient existence. Ultimately orphaned, the baby named Jean-Baptiste Grenouille is passed between many different wet nurses and institutions as his “otherness” is immediately noticed: he has no natural odour. All in all I think the movie could have been better, but it was definitely better than I'd feared and is well worth a look.It’s 1738 and a baby boy has been born in the middle of a Paris market, surrounded by the stench of rotting fish and corpses.
It just did not grip me the way the book had, did not pull me into this world of smells, and after 2 hours I started getting impatient for the story to finally move on and wrap up. Putting scent into images, however, is even more difficult than putting them into words, in my opinion, and this is where the movie lacked. I was pleasantly surprised - the movie is well done, beautifully filmed (I especially enjoyed the period details that always felt very down-to-earth and alive), and the main character was never attractive and actually quite creepy (although in my mind, Grenouille will probably always more resemble a Gollum-like creature). However, when I had the chance to see a press showing of it, I knew I had to see it because Süskind's book was one of the highlights of my school career. I'd only heard bad things about this movie in advance and I hadn't been too impressed with the trailer - I thought the actor playing Grenouille was too pretty, giving his behavior an almost sensual feel, which it definitely shouldn't have.
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