In case you didn’t know, later this month is National
Celebration of the Senses Day. As a Taurus, known lovers of sensual pleasures
and luxuries, I will be honoring this holiday to the extreme. For those of you
that are a little less inclined to overindulging your senses, I offer a
guilt-free alternative. Watch Perfume.
What, you’ve never heard of this movie? I’m not surprised.
It’s entirely possible the only reason I know about it is that in college we
made a habit of looking up Alan Rickman movies (for Alan Rickman movie night,
duh). The full name is Perfume: The Story
of a Murderer. It is based on a book, but I only brought myself around to
reading it some time after first seeing the movie. I didn’t particularly care
for the book. I believe my friend Jenn prefers it though, so don’t take my
opinion as a reason not to read it.
Perfume is an
interesting movie. I shy away from terms like “good” for this one, but there
are things about it that I find very compelling. There are also parts that are
a total mind screw, just to warn you. I happened upon a post the
other day that notes Perfume “both
suffers from and subsequently plays with the fact that film is still a medium
that cannot engage all of our senses, such as smell,” which I consider both
remarkably accurate, and one of the main reasons I (somewhat) enjoy the movie.
The main gist of Perfume
is that there is a character, Jean-Baptiste, who has such a heightened sense of
smell that he experiences the world in an entirely different manner from the
rest of us. He fears losing wonderful smells, and becomes a perfume apprentice
in order to learn how to capture scent. His goal evolves to try and create the
perfect perfume.
While this is an interesting premise, I can’t say the
storyline is the draw for me. That’s probably why I didn’t really care for the
book. What I find fascinating is the way the movie tries to get the viewer to
experience what Jean-Baptiste experiences. Obviously, we can’t. We can’t smell
things through the tv. What they do instead is use visuals and audio to pull us
into the same mindset. This is what I so thoroughly enjoy about the movie.
The other interesting aspect of the movie is the ending.
While I’m not going to give away any spoilers here, we used to make people
watch Perfume just to see how they
reacted to the end.
This is a movie that I feel like everyone should watch at
least once, and then I’d enjoy discussing it with them, but there’s a good
possibility you may dislike it or be morally offended. So since I like lists,
here are some reasons to either watch, or not watch it.
Reasons to Watch Perfume
5. Dustin Hoffman wears a wig. What, that’s not a good
enough reason for you?? His scenes are plenty great without the wig, but it’s
nonetheless a source of delight.
4. The dark humor is amusing if you like that type of thing.
3. The visuals (in my opinion) are stunning.
2. If nothing else, it raises tons of great questions about
life, meaning, beauty, sociopaths, and so on and so forth.
1. Alan Rickman portrays potentially the fictional world’s
best father (Liam Neeson is probably winning that contest); very appropriate as
Father’s Day is also coming up.
Reasons Perfume
May Traumatize or Offend You
5. There’s violence.
4. There’s nudity.
3. There’s a casual disregard of humanity.
2. There are religious references and some religious figures
involved in unseemly behavior.
1. The ending, pardon my French (that’s a joke by the way,
since the movie is based in France. I knew you didn’t know that so I was nice
enough to clarify), is a total “what the f*ck” experience.
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| This will take on a whole new meaning... |
If you do watch it, or have watched it before, please find
me (that can be virtually, we don’t need to get into a stalking scenario) and
tell me your thoughts! I will say this, the movie left such a strong impression
on me that I spent several subsequent days with trash cans placed in front of
my door. This is actually my friend Jenn’s top reason for why you should watch Perfume, and it will make more sense
once you do!
