What would you do?

By: amatorian
Date: Sunday, May 27, 2007

I believe people will be lost on how they should feel about the characters in this movie.  Perhaps they will be attempting to care for the Jean-Baptiste, care for the plight he has.  There is no necessity for it, an unimportance forms throughout it.  We are not meant to be concerned for our main character, we are not meant to even truly understand our stories centerpiece.

We are merely supposed to be watching with voyeuristic intentions.

Perfume is the tale of Jean-Baptiste Grenouille (played brilliantly by Ben Whishaw), a man born in the eighteenth century to unfortunate circumstance.  He is raised in an orphanage and has a unique gift all unto himself.  His ability to smell the world is greater than anybody else’s.  He can smell glass!!  Words to him are merely reflections of scent; visuals to him are just a side-note to the nasal flavor.  Jean’s story is that of obsession, his obsession to create the smells only he knows, to preserve them for as long as possible, which he tries through various perfuming methods.

Along the path he finds the most beautiful scent of them all floating from a redheaded girl of lowly position.  Here is a smell he must capture, he must obtain for to have lost it time and time again would be maddening beyond belief.  At first he learns the basics of perfume creation from an old renowned perfumer (Dustin Hoffman), creating constructs for his master of all kinds and scents.  Yet, still, he is unable to create those scents in his head, those that elude the rest of us but are ever present within Jean.

In the end Perfume is a story of obsession, of love and of death.  Through Jean-Baptiste we see a sort of hyper-realistic self-analyzing.  We all believe we are special, unique amongst some deities plan.  Made manifest into an actual character, one with such an ability, one so great that to even begin understanding is impossible.  We are not meant to so much understand Jean-Baptisite, but recognize the obsessive, the need within him.  He is special, he is uniquely different and because of that what he desires is not a normality of ours.  We are repulsed and disgusted by his actions.

There is an innocence to him that is not supposed to exist inside a killer of this nature, one as meticulous and uncompassionate as the more known Hannibal Lector.  Jean’s actions display an affection rarely seen in the screen and perhaps that’s what disturbs us the most.  Not that this individual is doing the most atrocious of acts, not that his obsession is what’s causing it but that throughout it all he does not even believe what he is doing is against societies standards.  There is no guilt, no remorse.  To him there is no need to worry not because he believes in something different than the rest, not because he just doesn’t care but because somehow he doesn’t even know it’s wrong by anybodies standards.

What he does he does out of love.  Out of compassion and adoration.  Here we have the most frightening of killers, one that sees his actions as so natural that societies constraints don’t even register in his mind as a basic thought.  These are the actions of a man believing what he is doing is no different than courting a lovely lady to coffee or dinner. 

It is difficult to explain, too much comes out sounding like other villains that have played our eyes and ears in another world.  I suppose to watch the movie is the only way to see where I am going with this.  There is a strange subtlety to the way Ben Whishaw plays the character.  Though a few explosive moments do occur with Jean, for the most part it’s a calm and serene role to play.  The difficulty in it must have been mind blowing to make us believe such a person might be real.  In fact, the surrounding characters almost have to up the volume to compensate for the composed lows of Jean.

Everything here culminates together in such seamless patterns that without the natural fear this film may play in our own head, the natural distaste and misunderstanding, it wouldn’t work nearly as well.  We are not meant to feel for the character.  We watch, we question and deep inside at the black pit that everybody has a comparison is made.

What would you do for that which you long for the most?  Those which you need to find meaning?

One of my top ten for 2006 (just barely considering this movie came out at the ass-end of December)

Amatorius

Click here to read the staff review by Mania.