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The novel is a very dark and somewhat funny story about a French 18th C man/monster who has a perfect sense of smell and who is obsessed with creating the perfect perfume, which for reasons is best obtained from the skin of a dead girl. Not perhaps the easiest of scripts to write!

And hmm the film is a bit of a miss really. It's got nice Ben Whishaw in it, who does what he can with a rather unsympathetic character, Alan Rickmann, and Dustin Hoffman in a rather strange part for him as a failing perfumier and various attractive females who end up dead. The photography is good.

warshipadmin wrote: ↑Tue Dec 31, 2024 4:11 am The novel is a very dark and somewhat funny story about a French 18th C man/monster who has a perfect sense of smell and who is obsessed with creating the perfect perfume, which for reasons is best obtained from the skin of a dead girl. Not perhaps the easiest of scripts to write!

And hmm the film is a bit of a miss really. It's got nice Ben Whishaw in it, who does what he can with a rather unsympathetic character, Alan Rickmann, and Dustin Hoffman in a rather strange part for him as a failing perfumier and various attractive females who end up dead. The photography is good.

I love the novel. It was on the "Der Spiegel" bestseller list for over nine years (roughly comparable to the NYT bestseller list for the USA). It has so many layers and facets that it is almost like reading a new novel each time I pick it up again.

Major nit: The scent could be obtained from the skin of a living - virgin - girl, but emotions and stress would taint the scent, so Grenouille (which means "frog" in French, just as an aside) decides to kill them quickly and bloodlesly to preserve the purity of the scent. He basically sees the killing as a necessity, and derives no pleasure from it the way a psychopathic serial killer would. He also has absolutely no bodily scent of his own and thus is "invisible" to everybody unless they see him directly. Including guard dogs.

The movie was as good as it could possibly get. They tried hard and mostly succeeded in "translating" scent to moving pictures.