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Herald Rating: **
The 1985 novel by German writer Patrick Suskind, which is this film's source, was a creepy, clammy and compelling meditation on identity and psychopathology which was also, not incidentally, a highly entertaining primer on the techniques of the parfumier, including maceration and enfleurage.
That book's many admirers will not be alone in their disappointment with the movie version, but they may feel it more keenly than those new to the story. Stanley Kubrick, never daunted by difficulty, pronounced the book unfilmable and Suskind refused for years to sell the rights until he finally relented to the repeated approaches of friend and veteran producer Bernd Eichinger.
The result is a film that not only fails to achieve what the book did - conjure the chaotic world of scent in which the main character lived - but also entirely misses its point. The novel's main figure, Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, has two distinguishing characteristics: a preternatural, even paranormal, sense of smell and a void where any moral sense, or even soul, ought to be. The film version tries valiantly and futilely to evoke the former but fatally also gives us a Grenouille who is handsome and sad and wanders around the place looking like some sort of synaesthete halfwit.
The story, set in pre-revolutionary Paris, is that of a man born in a fishmarket's gut-heap and orphaned almost instantly by his mother's execution for trying to kill him. Sold to an orphanage and then to a tannery, he manages - by demonstrating his olfactory prowess - to secure an apprenticeship to the great perfumer Baldini, who teaches him the business. But he soon discovers that concocting the ultimate fragrance requires him to become a serial killer.
Director Tykwer, who announced his hyperkinetic style with his breakthrough film Run, Lola, Run, tries to convey the riot of smell by a riot of sight and sound - sizzling close-ups and a hallucinatory sound design - but it's all literal and banal because a picture of something smelly doesnt convey its smell. Likewise when Grenouille catches a whiff of a distant scent, he gulps the air like a drowning man - scarcely the act of a man with the gift of such sensitivity.
Slowly but surely, the film turns Grenouille into a common or garden psycho and drags us towards an embarrassingly ludicrous climax. Hoffman as Baldini has fun, but that's because he's acting in another film altogether, a camp comedy. Rickman, as the nobleman Richis, trying to protect his daughter from being distilled and bottled, looks faintly nauseous most of the time. It's not hard to sympathise.
Cast: Ben Whishaw, Dustin Hoffman, Alan Rickman, Rachel Hurd-Wood, John Hurt Director: Tom Tykwer Running time: 147 mins Rating: R16, nudity and content that may disturb Screening: Rialto Verdict: Banal and obvious adaptation entirely misses the point of a subtle and brilliant bestseller.
