Film: Perfume - The Story Of A Murderer

As soon as a novel is described as "unfilmable" and starts to amass a list of big name directors who have toyed with the project and moved on, any adaptation seems doomed to partial or total failure. Even ideal matches such as Terry Gilliam directing Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas failed to do much commercial business. So Perfume, the book of aromas that Martin Scorsese and Stanley Kubrick apparently walked away from, would seem to be damned from the off - whether by reason or just self-fufilling prophecy.

The story revolves around an orphan called Jean-Baptiste Grenouille who is born with the finest sense of smell in the world. This we know because is seems that half the film is taken up by shots of his nose twitching followed by a camera charging like a demented rugby player towards the source of the aroma. Jean is not the best adjusted of men, and his quest to distill the perfect sent starts to take a very dark and ugly turn, as the films full title "Perfume: The Story Of A Murderer" rather gives away. What next, "Titanic: A Ship That Sinks" or "Pearl Harbour: A Historical And Filmic Disaster".

The film is directed by Tom Tykwer who had a huge cult hit with his debut Run Lola Run. He also has past form with bringing troubled projects about murderers to the screen having done an excellent job with Heaven in 2002, the film that Krzysztof Kieslowski was working on when he died. Since then he has taken a long break from film-makingand the un-even tone of Perfume may reflect an uncertainty that has crept in during the years of stasis.

The source novel is very dark and serious in tone, however the film elicits a number of laughs through it's length, some clearly un-intentional and some maybe less so. The most farcical section features Dustin Hoffman as a washed up perfumier whose career is re-ignited by the talents of Jean-Baptiste. Allowing for the horrific accent that careers between Italy and America faster than Concorde ever managed, Hoffman turns in a magnetic mannered comic performance that is in completely the wrong film.

Perfume is visually stunning, as befits the most expensive German film ever made. However the story it tells is art-house rather than mainstream and the over-bearing hand of producers trying to lighten the tone lingers like the smell of burnt toast in a kitchen. So yet another "unfilmable novel" seems to justify it's billing, but there is enough here to make for an intriguing, if ultimately unsatisfying watch.