Perfume: The Story of a Murderer
Director: Tom Tykwer
Year: 2006
Stars: Ben Wishaw, Dustin Hoffman, Alan Rickman, Rachel Hurd-Wood
I've been wanting to watch this for a while. Having read the book a while ago, I was curious about how it had been adapted for film. Admittedly, we have had a recording of the film for some time - it's just taken us ages to finally watch it!
The film is, for the most part, very faithful to the book. It tells the tale of Grenouille, a 19th century Frenchman who is born with an incredibly superior sense of smell. Given the title, I don't think it's giving anything away to say that Grenouille discovers the scent of females and starts killing them in order to try and preserve their scent.
The only faults with the film are really faults of the book - I still have issues with the ending, and the film stays faithful to almost all aspects of it. Whilst this is refreshing for a movie, it's one time when I would happily have seen an ending changed! Otherwise, the film does a great job of recreating the atmosphere of the book and somehow managing to evoke the idea of scents successfully.
Rating: 4 out of 5
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