Perfume: The Story of a Murderer

Tom Tykwer’s film follows Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, born on the floor of an eighteenth century Paris fish market with no scent of his own and a nose that misses nothing. He learns distilling from the perfumer Baldini, then goes to Grasse and kills young women to fix their scent. Süskind withheld the rights to his 1985 novel for years; producer Bernd Eichinger secured them and wrote the screenplay with Andrew Birkin and Tykwer. Shooting ran through the summer of 2005: a fortnight at the Bavaria studios in Munich, Barcelona standing in for the Paris streets and fish market, Figueres for the tannery and dungeon, Provence for the lavender. Tykwer refused to render smell as an effect. By his own account the method is Grenouille cupping his nose and close shots of that nose; the fish market and lavender carry the rest. The closing crowd sequence took 750 Spanish extras, four weeks of rehearsal with the theatre group La Fura dels Baus in a sports hall, over a week of shooting and 27 hours of material for that passage. Whishaw was cast after Tykwer saw his Hamlet. A good fit if you will meet the film halfway when the camera moves to a nose. Not for you if a realist tone broken in one stroke at the end reads as a cheat.