Ray Pride

Tom Tykwer's epic, ambitious adaptation--he directed, co-wrote and co-scored--of Patrick Suskind's world-best-selling novel, "Perfume: The Story of a Murderer" has moments that show how close his intense, inventive visual style can come to the intuitive inventiveness of a director he resembles, Steven Spielberg (who co-produced "Perfume" and offered notes to Tykwer). The first ten minutes of the story of Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, a heartless and, as it turns out, a scentless young man (Ben Whishaw) who struggles from being plopped out by his mother into the propulsive, throbbing muck beneath a squalid fishmonger's stall to become a journeyman perfumer. There's prodigious human churn and Hogarthian effulgence on show, capturing nineteenth-century street life in Paris and Venice with energy and imagination to burn. In rain, a pen nib leaves a watery spread, leaching to a green rather than black or gray. Tannery grime glistens with smoke and urea. Grenouille walks into his first sensation of sensuality and madness in the invisible haze of a red-haired virgin's freckled and powdered waft. He's trained by aging "nose" Bellini, played by Dustin Hoffman who, as always, tempers his scenery biting with generous wit and physical grace. Whishaw is very good as a restless, unjudgemental voluptuary, but the dense, dour design of the film comes across in passages as cold as that of a man who wants to distill the essence of dispatched virgins to create a scent that will seduce all, triumph over all. (The rock star permutations late in the picture are eye-widening and weird.) Yellow plums. The invocation of "bergamot, patchouli, rosemary." A concatenation of essential rapture and desire erupts when Bellini imagines a garden of memory and all that is olfactory within. Tykwer is a wizard of temporal and spatial shifts, and you must nod toward any man who can direct a scene of Hoffman, beneath a powdered wig, telling Grenouille, "You sir, you have a fine nose!"

"Perfume: The Story of a Murderer" opens Friday.

(2007-01-02)

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