Perfume the movie

Yesterday I've seen the movie "Perfume the story of a murderer" and I enjoyed it very much. I read the book a couple of times because the story is intriguing. I was real curious about how they would make a film based on the novel "Das Parfum" by Patrick Suskind(see photo on your right) from Germany who wrote the novel in 1985. There are 15 million books sold until now. Only in 2001 he gave away the film rights for 10 million Euro!!! The movie was directed by the German film director Tom Tykwer.

The story is about Jean-Baptiste Grenouille who was born in the 18th Century in Paris and had an incomparable sense of smell. He had a live without love and was only interested in scents and smell, not only scents that considered to be "nice" smells but also "bad" smells. The strange thing was that he didn't own a body odor of his own and noticed that because his body didn't had a smell he was a nobody to everyone. It was as if everyone was looking right through him and didn't notice him at all. As he grew up he "fell in love" with the smell of a young woman, a virgin. He wasn't fallen in love with her person but only by her scent, her sent gave him tears in his eyes and he was deeply touched by it. He wanted to know how he could conserve her scent, and wanted to create a scent for his own so he wouldn't be no longer a nobody to everyone.

When he met the perfumer Giuseppe Baldini he proved that he could do miracles with scents and created a perfume without ever learned how to make it. The perfumer was so impressed and knew that he could use Jean-Baptiste Grenouille to make him new wonderful perfumes a thing he wasn't capable of anymore.

The perfumer learned him how to conserve scent and Jean-Baptiste finally knew how to use it for conserving the scent of the young woman. He had to kill her, shaved her had and spread her in a layer of animal fat what absorbed her scent. He distilled the fat and finally had a view drops of her scent. He killed 12 virgins to complete his divine perfume....

It must have been a difficult job to make a movie about smell without actual smelling it but the book didn't have smell as well. I think they did a wonderful job filming this novel. Some parts of the novel are different but the movie tells the whole story complete and changed only small bits, I think because it was necessary for the movie.

Some parts of the movie could be "smelled" I think that's something incredibly difficult for a movie. I especially liked the end of the movie when he's about to be executed, when he's got disgusted by humans, he thinks about the women he killed and realized there is also something else to enjoy the scent of a woman... by making love to her, he never thought about that before.