Perfume: The Story of a Murderer


Artykuł pochodzi z pisma "Guardian"


Peter Bradshaw
Friday December 22, 2006
The Guardian


Twenty years ago, Patrick Süskind's bestseller Perfume was the very height of literary fashion: a commercial publishing sensation. Revived now on celluloid by German director Tom Tykwer, the story is a bit of an embarrassment, like finding a pair of 80s leg-warmers at the back of a drawer. Did people really wear these things?
Everything about Perfume looks conceited and overblown, heavy with middlebrow self-importance and spurious period detail. Only the appearance of that mythically delayed film version of DM Thomas's once wildly fashionable 1981 novel The White Hotel would create a bigger wince.
The intensely gaunt Ben Whishaw plays Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, a young man born to poverty in the slums of 18th-century Paris. He has an extraordinary talent, at once animal and superhuman, for smell. Grenouille can detect and distinguish smells for miles, and through fierce cunning and rodent survival instinct, he gets himself indentured to master perfumier Baldini (Dustin Hoffman). Grenouille's genius revives the old man's fortunes, but he becomes disenchanted with the unsatisfactory distillation techniques for isolating the constituent notes of a perfume, and travels to Grasse in the south of France, where the ancient art of enfleurage is practised: the removal of a flower's essential oil. Here Grenouille indulges his secret ambition, triggered by a violent event in the Paris backstreets. He will create the perfect scent of a woman's body - a hideous alchemy for which he will need 13 beautiful female corpses.
Since Perfume came out in print, the movie version of The Silence of the Lambs has made serial killers modish, so the movie now has to trick out Grenouille's story with some appropriately procedural touches. The clothes of his victims are shown laid out in one scene, along a sheet of tarpaulin, as if assembled by a 21st-century forensic expert. Alan Rickman, playing the father of a beautiful young woman for whom Grenouille has conceived a special fascination, earnestly tells the terrified townspeople that they must start to think the way the killer thinks. A remarkably prescient approach.
It's a good idea for a story, and the scene in which Grenouille first mixes a perfume for Baldini in his private laboratory is gripping. But the plot loses 80% of its energy when the scene is removed from Paris to Grasse, and nothing, but nothing can excuse that bizarre final scene in which the delirious burghers indulge in a gigantic orgy in the town square. This involves a battalion of extras required to cavort nude al fresco, but their mass Euro-literary shagging is filmed sedately, mostly in long-shot, and the whole thing looks like one of those famous British Airways crowd-scene ads, reimagined by Dr Alex Comfort. Alan Rickman's final encounter with Grenouille was enough to make me want to put a brown paper bag over my head and whinny like a tormented pony. Never was a story more obviously in dire need of a proper ending, and Grenouille himself - that fiercely wordless, feral killer - wastes no time becoming an incredible bore.

al fresco- na świeżym powietrzu
bizarre- dziwaczny
burgher- mieszczanin
cavort- brykać, baraszkować
constituent- składowy
cunning- chytry, przebiegły
delirious- majaczący, bredzący
disenchanted- rozczarowany
enfleurage- wydobywać aromat z kwiatów bez udziału procesu destylacji
feral- dziki
gaunt- mizerny
gripping- pasjonujący, trzymający w napięciu
indenture- zawierać umowę
indulge- ulegać (pokusie), folgować
middlebrow- przeciętny, niewyszukany
overblown- nadęty, napuszony
prescient- przewidujący, proroczy
rodent- gryzoń
sedately- statecznie, spokojnie
self-importance- zadufanie
shagging- dymanie (wulg)
spurious- złudny, błędny
tarpaulin- brezent
trigger- wywoływać, powodować
whinny- parskać, rżeć
wince- skrzywienie, wykrzywienie, grymas


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