I talk a lot about “atmosphere” on this thing. Usually I’m talking about some kind of intersection of mood, tone, and aesthetic that evokes a particular feeling in the viewer. One of the interesting things about Perfume (subtitled The Story Of A Murderer), however, is the degree to which it’s about actual atmosphere, at least to start. It’s a striking and expansive film, but for a film so much concerned with atmosphere, it makes choices in the second act that threaten to undo what is a very strong start.
We open in 18th century France, and there’s a man shackled in irons in a prison cell. A mob outside is calling for blood and the authorities are trying to keep them from storming the prison. Finally, he is dragged to a balcony, where his sentence is read to the mob. He is to be hung upon a cross, his limbs broken with an iron bar, and then left to die. The mob seems satisfied with this, so we begin wondering who he is, and what he did to merit such a horrific end.
The man is Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, born some years before to a poor fishmonger in Paris. 18th-century Paris, like many large cities at the time, stank. It stank of livestock and shit and effluent and rot and human grime. And nowhere did it stink more than its market, filled with meat and fish and produce slowly spoiling in the sun. Grenouille’s mother unceremoniously goes into labor in her market stall, and she squats long enough to push him out, cut the umbilical cord and shove him to the side, assuming like all the others (so many others) that he’s stillborn. She’s got fish to sell, she’ll get rid of the body later.
And then Jean-Baptiste, amid the filth, begins to wail.
Funny thing about infancy - we aren’t born with all of our senses up and running. Before we can see clearly, we can smell. It’s how infants locate their mothers in a room full of people. And Jean-Baptiste has entered the world in a riot of smells, most of them awful, all of them oppressive. His mother shortly meets a bad end, and he is remanded to an orphanage. As he grows, it becomes clear that Jean-Baptiste Grenouille has a superhuman sense of smell. All of his other senses seem to work fine, but it is through scent that he most acutely experiences the world. He grows up to work in a tannery, and one day while delivering some hides, he discovers the most intoxicating scent of all - that of a young woman selling plums in the street.
But it fades so quickly upon her death.
There’s a lot of promise in the setting and premise. France before the revolution was a time of supreme decadence and supreme squalor, of silks and brocades and mud and shit, of face powder covering weeping sores. It’s a time when the lives of the poor are cheap, and the wealthy are above laws. And the first act really captures that sense of oppressive, claustrophobic rot and the ruling class that floats above it all, in search of ever more exotic pleasures to sate their jaded palates. It evokes the case of
Gilles de Rais about 300 years prior, and the decadent protagonist of J.K. Huysman’s
Against Nature, suggesting a story about the uncaring rich using the poor like cattle in the pursuit of pleasure. The Paris of the first act verges on nightmarish, and there’s definitely a horror movie in here somewhere. In the first act you really get a sense of what could be, in that respect. A miasma hangs over Paris, a sense that death and decay are everywhere.
But then the second act takes a surprisingly conventional turn as Grenouille, now apprenticed to a perfumier, heads out into the countryside to study increasingly esoteric techniques of extracting and preserving scent, and I think the film suffers from its departure from the city. There’s less miasma - the fresh air and sunshine of the countryside rob the film of some of that oppressive power and the tone sort of shifts. It’s when the stakes should escalate, when the cost of Grenouille’s obsession should be most acutely felt, but it feels very compressed, as Grenouille somehow manages to pull off a string of fairly complicated murders under the nose of his employers in a fairly small town. It reduces the action to him murdering someone, the body being found, and outrage increasing, then repeat. There's a whole new subplot introduced about a young noblewoman who doesn't want to go through with an arranged marriage and I think it crowds out the parts that should be getting developed a little more gradually, as if now we're watching a movie inside the movie we're already watching. There are still some wonderfully staged scenes and the sense of how class determines the value of a life remains intact, but for me it lacked the oppressiveness of the first act, felt mechanical and beggared believability. It went from being this nightmare to Law & Order: Jane Austen.
Which is too bad, because it’s a tremendously well-assembled film. It’s beautifully staged and shot, with light (and its absence) playing a strong role - interiors are lit and shot like paintings by the Old Masters, the streets of Paris are uniformly muddy brown and grey with harsh sunlight falling between the buildings, The countryside is all verdant color and warm candlelight, but wherever you are, terrible thing can happen in the shadows. Given that it’s set in France, it’s odd that everyone speaks with some variety of English accent, but the performances are fine if not especially nuanced, with the exception of Grenouille, who is spooky and feral and arrogant and detached by turns. It’s got the kind of budget that makes for a believable period setting, and it has a sense of scale most of the films I write about don’t get to have. Which again, that’s something horror film could use - imagine the story of a huge, overcrowded city, teeming with all kinds of life scrabbling to survive in the margins while royalty so divorced from the concerns of the masses that they might as well be a different species harvest the poor for sport. And imagine that brought to life in a way that feels real. I think it’d be something to see.
The final act recoups somewhat as we return to the beginning of the film, with Grenouille facing his execution. It goes some unexpected places in grand fashion, and the end feels fitting to the rest of the film, but it never really gets back to the cruel, sinister indifference of its beginning. This was never strictly a horror film, and maybe a whole 2 and a half hours of that would have been hard to take, as hard to stomach as breathing 18th century Paris air, but it left me with the impression of what this film could have been, as if I were granted a whiff of something different, only to have it snatched away.
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