This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 11th, 2007 at 11:50 am and is filed under Drama, P, Thriller/Mystery. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.
Director: Tom Tykwer
Starring: Ben Wishaw, Dustin Hoffman, Rachel Hurd-Wood, Alan Rickman
This started out as a meandering, but mildly interesting period piece that takes a hard left into absurdity in the last half hour. The sets and costumes are good, but the performances are inconsistent, including a distracting muddled accent by, of all people, Dustin Hoffman. John Hurt adds some atmosphere with effective, but uncredited narration (I can only guess he saw the finished product and took his name off – good call, John). The story is quite original, but is very slow and dark, with a lead character who doesn’t seem to fit anywhere, including this movie.
Ben Wishaw is Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, an orphan in 18th century France, whose brutish, peasant life is enlightened only by his enjoyment of smells. Young Mr. Grenouille is very gifted in his olfactory sense, but completely lost in interactions with people. In time, he begins to apprentice for a down-on-his-luck perfume maker played by Dustin Hoffman. Soon, he has learned all about making perfume (and I had learned more than I ever wanted to know) and created a hundred commercially successful fragrances, but he is still not happy. In time, he is off to search for more knowledge and to try to capture the perfect scent that eludes him. We know that something must have gone wrong, however, since the film opened with Mr. Grenouille awaiting a particularly cruel execution, but how it comes to this, i will not say, in case you still want to see this movie after my review .
The first two thirds of this movie, which is apparently based on a novel that I will never read, is ponderously hypnotic and I was all set to rate it higher, until silliness set in and tried to fly by me with a straight face. Nope. I didn’t like the third act here, at all and found the rest of the movie only moderately passable. Those who like gritty period pieces, in the From Hell genre, you may find this one palatable, but it is nowhere near as good as that Johnny Depp project. I don’t need supernatural smelling ability to tell me that something stunk, as I watched this.
