I put Perfume on my Netflix queue as kind of a joke. We had seen the preview with some friends, and one of them was quite creeped out by the trailer, so I decided that we'd have to watch the movie. Things fell apart when the movie actually arrived, so I wound up just watching it with Katie. Altogether, it wasn't a bad movie at all. In fact, it was an intense ride that I really enjoyed, right up to the last 20 minutes or so. The movie is focused on Jean-Baptiste Grennouille, who was born on the ground of a Parisian fish marked in the 18th Century. As he grows up, he learns that he has an intense sense of smell, and after spending some time working at a tannery he encounters a woman with an intoxicating scent. Grennouille follows her smell into an alley where, in an attempt to smell her more, he accidentally kills her.
It's hard to say what exactly they are trying to make of Grennouille throughout the movie. Opinions I have read place Grennouille as a spawn of the devil due to his lack of scent, but while watching the movie, I felt that he was just an autistic man who was driven by his infatuation with the girl's scent. Either way, be becomes obsessed with learning how to store the scent of a human, and after an apprenticeship with a perfumer in Paris, where he learns that the best perfumes have a 12 note "chord" of smells, followed by a 13th grace note, he travels to Grasse, where he finally learns how to preserve the scent of a human. The only problem is that he kills the girls everytime he obtains their smell.
Without giving away too much of the rest of the movie, it's fairly obvious where the movie heads, and remains an intense ride, right up until the last 20 minutes. At that point, the movie kind of lost me. Not that it didn't make sense, but it just seemed to lack the credibility and realistic grittiness of the rest of the film. I will say that the final scene almost makes up for the preceding one, but I really wish that they had just skipped directly to it.
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