Perfume: The Murder of a Story

Language, gore, sex, smoking, tedium

Delaware Art Museum

Patrick Süskind’s 1985 novel Perfume: The Story of a Murderer made quite a splash. It was celebrated for its historical detail and its vivid descriptions of odors and olfactory perception. It was, said reviewer Peter Ackroyd in the New York Times, “in every sense an olfactory novel.” That doesn’t mean it was delightful period piece. Ackroyd called it “a meditation on the nature of death, desire and decay,” informed by “what must have been long and arduous research into the arcane aspects of 18th-century French life.”

[Süskind must be fun at cocktail parties.—Ed.]

In addition to finding it a grim, grotesque, and depressing story, I found the central olfactory conceit of Perfume—that the scentless protagonist Jean-Baptiste Grenouille can effortlessly identify at a distance every component of a complex fragrance—to be a ludicrous parody of real-life odor perception. Perhaps Süskind was aiming for a Germanic version of magical realism. But lacking humor or a sense of enchantment, his effort falls flat.

[I’ve been having the same problem with my manga version of Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time.—Ed.]

A film version of the novel, released in 2006, was a disaster. It featured Dustin Hoffman who by that time had begun his descent into the Focker films and Kung Fu Panda, and Alan Rickman who after a fine comedic turn in Galaxy Quest, deserved much better. This turkey of a costume drama was directed by the German Tom Tykwer who, in fairness, later redeemed himself with the splendid Babylon Berlin series.

The book and film must have resonated with German audiences because 2018 saw the release by German public television broadcaster ZDF of a six-part series called Parfum. Directed by Philipp Kadelbach, with writing credits going to Süskind and Eva Kranenburg, the series is a quasi police procedural only loosely inspired by Süskind’s novel. It takes place in the present day and is set in the bleak landscape of northern Germany. It follows five friends from boarding school, now grown up and all suspects in the murder-mutilation of a woman they all knew.

I watched the entire damned thing on Netflix. It is slow paced, unsavory, and disturbing. The plot takes forever to unfold and is impenetrably complex: it shifts back and forth in time by decades which makes it difficult to keep the (unsympathetic) characters straight. All in all, frustrating and not fun to watch.

Am I being too harsh? Well, even the reviewer for Der Spiegel panned it (“Complete catastrophe from the Lower Rhine”).

You might think German audiences finally had had enough of Süskind’s Perfume. If so, you underestimate their Sitzfleisch.

Last week I watched yet another iteration of Süskind’s novel. The Perfumier is a new German Netflix movie from director Nils Willbrandt. It took me eight or nine attempts to get through it. Why? Because it is set (again) in bleak northern Germany. Because it (again) proceeds at a sloooooow and tedious pace. Because the actors appear to be narcotized. The characters are deranged doodle versions of Süskind’s originals: instead of being scentless, the Grenouille character has a congenital bad smell about him—yet for some reason this never become relevant to the present-day plot. His accomplice is a woman named Rex who has a metal plate in her head. The protagonist is a police woman (again) who suffers from longstanding anosmia (inverse doodle) which is cured when she becomes pregnant and is struck in the head with a log by Grenouille. (In the real world, head injuries are a leading cause of smell loss, not a cure. Aargh.)

This film is a dog. Again, don’t take my Wort for it. Ask Oliver Armknecht at German film review site film-rezensionen.de. The review’s subheads give you a Geschmack of his take:

Das Geruchsmorden geht weiter [The smell killing goes on]

Zu viel Drama, zu wenig Spannung [Too much drama, not enough excitement]

Here’s his wrap-up:

That’s the film’s bigger problem: It’s pretty boring. Although the runtime is actually manageable at just over an hour and a half, not enough happens here to justify even this. This is partly offset by the atmospheric settings and the well-known ensemble. But only in part. There are reasons why Der Parfumeur is hardly advertised and discussed compared to the heavily hyped event series a few years ago. As well known as the original and the universe of the perfume murders may be, this late sequel is such an insignificant event that it could have been dispensed with entirely.

It took Patrick Süskind years to agree to let his novel be filmed. It’s said he turned down offers from a lot of Hollywood producers. Perhaps he sensed they wouldn’t maintain his narrative focus on “death, desire and decay.” They might, after all, have made something entertaining. Such as Adam Sandler in The Fart Smeller. Or Vin Diesel in The Fast and the Fragrant. If Süskind really wanted death, desire and decay he should let Rob Zombie direct—the soundtrack alone would be awesome.