Smell the Perfume and the Brilliance

The beginning, made me flinch, cover my eyes and judge the movie immediately. In the first five minutes, a woman gives birth to her fifth child under her fish stall, by herself. She forcibly pushes out the baby, severs the umbilical cord with the same knife she used on her fish minutes ago and leaves the baby to die on a pile of scales, vomit, rats and other unmentionables.

That was it, I thought. I could see the rest of the evening. You could smell the filth and sense the smell getting under your skin. Little did I know, that was exactly what the Director wanted. After all the movie is all about smell. 

Das Parfum (Perfume: The story of a murderer) is a popular book in German, written by Patrick Süskind. Though I must admit,(a little red in the face),  I have not read the book the movie has me in a stupor. Jean-Baptiste Grenouille (Ben Winshaw) is an olfactory genius with a life in the dumps. He can smell and distinguish a million scents before he can speak. But he himself does not have a smell. He can walk into a room and no one can smell him, he can hold his lover but she can't smell him long after he has gone. This hits him so hard, he sets out to make the world's finest perfume. At the cost of a dozen women.

The movie, though starkly made is one of the finest movies I have ever seen. It isn't just the eyes that are doing the work, in this case watching the movie is a sensory experience. The movie scores for brilliant acting by Ben Winshaw and Alan Rickman (most of us know him as Severus Snape from Harry Potter), superb music that enhances the film and a story that is bizarre but has the power to make you believe it. (Trivia Alert) This movie hardly made it outside Europe, owing to its story and extreme nudity. Watch the movie for its sheer brilliance.