movies: perfume

Today wasn't a planned movie visit... even though we were down at Marion, we only decided that we might as well go to the movies after we'd actually done everything we wanted to do and were technically ready to leave. But the weather outside was disgustingly hot, the car was safely undercover, we had vouchers for $10 movie tickets and we were already there, so we figured why the hell not... and boy, oh boy am I glad we did...

I've been wanting to see Perfume since I happened to catch the trailer months and months and months ago on SBS during the German news (since the movie is a German production, but in English)... and even though the voice over and the trailer were all in German and I didn't understand a damn word of it, I just knew from the visuals alone that this was definitely a movie that was going on my "Must See" list...

Of course it didn't hurt that it was all about 18th Century France... as I've said before, I'm SO all about movies set in that sort of general timeframe... but unlike other recent offerings, Perfume lived up to it's promise...

From almost the first second that Ben Whishaw appeared on the screen I was just captivated by him... I can't explain it, but there was just something magnetic or hypnotic about him. Okay, I will admit, it didn't hurt that he's very much my ideal physical type (all long and lean and defined all to buggery), and that his outfits for most of the movie showed off a large proportion of his flesh (although mostly in an incidental kind of way)... but he's mostly dirty and technically evil for the whole movie, yet I couldn't take my eyes off him.

And it wasn't just him, the whole movie had me entranced, and a little quizzical, wanting to know more, take in as much as possible, absorb the movie basically. I actually found that my brow had been furrowed at one point for some time, and I didn't remember doing it. But not in that "what the hell are they on about" kind of way.

This isn't the first movie where I've been completely on the serial killer's side and really wanted him to get away with what he was doing... the other one being The Talented Mr Ripley, although I think in this case, because Ma didn't walk away with the same feeling, and the killer in question was more disassociated from what he was doing, I think that actually says more about me and how I think than it does about the movie. He was pretty much a sociopath, but I still liked him...

Since it's a movie that's all about smell, it's kind of hard to convey with just sound and image (and I wouldn't imagine it wouldn't have been that much easier to do in the original book), but I thought they did fairly well, especially at the beginning when he experiences Paris for the first time... in a perfect world they could have used more cutting away to show the things represented by the various smells (particularly later in the movie), but the lingering camera work on the places where the smells were coming from worked quite well for the most part. It's just once they got more into the idea of the perfume that the approach didn't work as well I thought. But like I said, it is hard to convey without being too literal and heavy handed about it, so perhaps it was for the best, and let the audience decide for themselves what some of the more indefinable things smelled like.

And the movie may have earned itself the never before reached score of 5 out of 5, but alas, the ending got a little bit... I dunno... far fetched, fantastical, silly... and at a certain point I did wonder if the nearly two and a half hour running time wasn't a little much... while I wasn't really that aware of the time myself, I did notice that a number of other people in the cinema were kind of fidgeting more as the film went along.

So, in a nutshell, a fantastic movie, and definitely one for the "Must Own" list, but the ending was a little disappointing.

yani's rating: 4 base notes out of 5