PERFUME
Various cinemas
Richard Stamelman
PERFUME
Joy, obsession, scandal, sin 384pp. New York: Rizzoli. US$85.
0 847 82832 8
It has taken twenty-one years for an adaptation of Patrick Süskind’s cult novel, Perfume: The story of a murderer (1985), to reach the screens, and the reason for the delay must be obvious. How can a film director, even with the full panoply of special effects and simulations at his fingertips, suggest “the fleeting realm of scent”? As the first paragraph of the novel explains, that particular realm “leaves no trace in history”, and while its eighteenth-century antihero, Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, the homunculus with the preternaturally developed olfactory function, is as memorably “gifted and abominable” a fictional creation as any of the post-war period, his macabre compulsion – to distil from the essence of young girls a scent that will subjugate mankind – is hard to convey cinematically. A number of directors, including Martin Scorsese, Ridley Scott and Tim Burton, have at one time or another sniffed around Süskind’s book, but they must have come to the same conclusion as Stanley Kubrick, who apparently declared it unfilmable.
At last, however, the German director Tom Tykwer (with Bernd Eichinger as producer) has taken on this most perplexing of challenges, dismissing the problem in an interestingly breezy way: “While Süskind used the clear and exact power of words, we use the power of image, noise and music . . . . When filming a lawn in sunlight, or even a single tree, all that is needed is absolute optical precision and then smells are created”. Eichinger’s faith in synaesthesia is probably over-optimistic, though there is no doubting the visual beauty of his film. But it is relatively easy for a visual artist to portray a high wind: plainly, we are in the realm of observable effects. Smell is of a different order; perfume – literally “the smoke that passes through” – lays down a trail of complex internal associations. More simply, a photograph of a field of lavender, or of a vat of macerating jasmine petals, however immaculately achieved, does not smell. Celluloid is odourless.
Help may be at hand. “Headspace analysis”, a beguiling offshoot of the new technologies, makes it possible to separate out scent molecules, reproduce them synthetically, and store them in a computer database, along with the so-called “hedonics” – the pleasant moods associated with the scent. Could these molecules not be dispersed through an auditorium’s air conditioning? (The trash director John Waters tried something similar with his “Odorama” release, Polyester, in the 1980s.) A recent experiment – somewhat less grisly for the subjects than the manipulations of Grenouille – also tried to determine the natural scent of four fair-skinned women – two virgins and two mature women – by clamping a bell jar over the “purest zone of the female body”, apparently just below the navel. Analysis of the results yielded two close “scent” analogies – one to the lotus flower, the other to cotton blossom. I owe this singular fact to a new book – also called Perfume, and subtitled “Joy, obsession, scandal, sin”.
Written by Richard Stamelman, a scholar of French poetry, it is a lavish production – with illustrations ranging from art-deco scent bottles to Mario Testino’s famous picture of Sophie Dahl, a powder-white nude with blazing red hair, in the Yves Saint-Laurent “Opium” ad – and a monumental work of archival research. It is also a testament of passion: Stamelman has clearly been subjugated by the olfactory arts, and inducted as an honorary member into the Société Française des Parfumeurs. His opening paragraphs on Bonnard’s painting “Le Cabinet de Toilette” or “Nu à contre-jour” (or “Eau de Cologne” on its first showing) offer a new reading of the painting, as being Bonnard’s attempt to visualize the emanations of perfume issuing from the little bottle in Marthe’s hand. Stamelman’s description, audacious and even controversial, might have stirred Grenouille:
The wavering, airy radiance created by the interplay of light and fabric – the flamelike arabesques of the white curtain, the pink-red swirls of the sofa, and the yellow-green patches of the wallpaper – reproduce the wavelike after-effect of perfume, what the French call “sillage”.
“Sillage” is what a fragrant woman leaves in her wake as she passes; “enfleurage” refers to the steeping of scent into layers of animal fat (a method favoured by Süskind’s obsessive). They are beautiful words, and scientific terms – for perfumery is an applied science, a fact comprehensively borne out by Stamelman’s book, as is its complementary status (to a French sensibility) as a form of art. Jean-Pierre Guerlain, creator of “Samsara”, can even sound a little like T. S. Eliot: “A perfume does not impose itself; it must translate a precise emotion. After much groping in the dark, the perfume begins to resemble the image which I had forged abstractly in my mind”.
The history of perfume and its existence as both science and art are germane to Süskind’s creation. The scenes in the film recounting Grenouille’s early apprenticeship in the Paris laboratory of Master Perfumer Giuseppe Baldini are among the best, both strangely touching and richly comic. The genial but jaded Baldini, played by Dustin Hoffman, is a comic foil to his socially unpresentable but monstrously gifted apprentice. Ben Whishaw’s unsmiling Grenouille squats before the alembic, watching every drop like a cat, but he retains a pleasing aspect of discipleship. And there is the same kind of delight in naked native genius, when he snatches bottles of essential oils apparently at random from Baldini’s shelves, and shakes them vigorously together, that we felt in Matt Damon’s Good Will Hunting, when Hunting, the part-time cleaner, solves a posted maths problem by scrawling on the corridor wall at MIT. Some viewers have complained, perhaps justifiably, that Whishaw is too handsome to make a plausible Grenouille (in the book a small, ugly, odourless creature). His skin is supposed to show every epidemic pockmark going, including the impress of anthrax, contracted in the dreadful tannery where the unkillable waif serves his first apprenticeship. Süskind’s recurrent analogy for Grenouille is with the blood-sucking tick that waits on a tree branch for a warm-blooded victim to pass below, and then drops. But during the famous orgiastic scene in Grasse, which is not the high point of the movie (where, less exaltedly, it resembles a Led Zeppelin album cover from the 1970s, or a Woodstock-style love-in crossed with Bosch’s “Garden of Earthly Delights”), Whishaw/Grenouille, who has enslaved the people with his “Attar of Virgin”, starts to look like Pan or Puck, or even a kind of homoerotic Rimbaud, and his saturnine good looks begin to make sense.
Perfume is a film on the grand scale – the credits roll on for ever, acknowledging an army of technicians and make-up artists. It should certainly be in the running for an Academy Award for costume design, if for nothing else. The director has pored lovingly over paintings by Bruegel, Chardin and Bosch, among others; there are numerous allusions and vignettes, culminating in a homage to Rembrandt’s “Night Watch”, as a flame-lit band of tartsa nd crooks, gathered in the Paris fish market, devour the protagonist in a supremely ironic expression of their “love”. Grenouille is cannibalized on the patch where he was born, flung by his mother on to a pile of fish entrails.
The description of the fetid stew that was Paris and the evocation of the gutting table are vivid – in particular the splatter of entrails, which foreshadow the dreadful slopping and pasting of fat on to Grenouille’s murdered virgins. His two principal victims, the first and the last, are similar types and similarly beautiful. The poor Parisian plum girl (Katharine Herfurth) prefigures the pale-skinned, chestnut-haired Laura Richis (Rachel Hurd-Wood) who provides the final “note” in Grenouille’s essence, the one that turns his perfume into a substance of baleful power. As the product of wealth and refinement, she is eminently saleable – or in this case, bottleable – as her anxious father, well played by Alan Rickman, recognizes only too well. But the girls’ beauty is incidental; their value is quintessential – a very literal and disturbing abstraction.
Stamelman devotes a section of his compendium to Süskind’s book, and raises the pertinent metaphysical questions, about Faustian-alchemical ambition, the ruthless pursuit of ends with no heed paid to means (Grenouille throws away what he doesn’t need – human lives), the analogy of the drive to create an absolutely pure art with fascist eugenics. But this last comparison with Hitler is difficult to sustain, for surely Grenouille’s malignant hatred is purely non-ideological; rather it stems, like that of Frankenstein’s Monster, from an appalling non-childhood, and from his loveless, autistic state of being-in-the-world. No one ever taught him the language of love or tenderness, so why should he not invent his own, detached from feeling, through the exercise of peerless olfactory power? There is a turning point in Grasse – the first whiff of Laura Richis in the enclosed garden – when the pursuit of perfection becomes murderous, but a long moment precedes it, the autarchic years of solitary perfume-evocation, when Grenouille’s obsession is that of a harmless ascetic. It is, of course, the marriage of acquisitive ambition to obsession that brings tragedy and ruin. And once Grenouille starts on his final bottling spree, once the Monster becomes his own Frankenstein in his “filthy workshop of creation”, then, as the menace and caress of John Hurt’s voiceover nicely imply, there is no stopping him.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Stephen Romer has been a Visiting Fellow at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge. His anthology Twentieth-Century French Poems appeared in 2002.
