If Only I Could Think Of A Smell-Related Pun, Like All The Real Film Critics
Because come on, no pun is too easy for them. It's like every critic has an overdeveloped pun gland. Give them a movie about smells and every goddamned critic goes "HO HO, THIS SMELL-TACULAR STINK-TROSCOPY blah blah blah AROMA OF A RANCID EXPOSITION!"
I relish the prospect of writing about a film like Perfume: The Story of a Murderer, one that received variably glowing and damning reviews. I am always confident that after I've seen it, I can rage wildly against either the impotent Establishment or the esoteric Avant-Garde, secure in the knowledge that I have again bested one of the polar critical forces with my loose-cannon attitude and plain old American moxie.
Which is why it sucks when I can only muster a resounding "meh."
Perfume isn't a bad film. It combines a bunch of elements that are individually pretty good, actually. It's just that they're good in a mostly incongruous way. It's a peculiar combination of an hourlong exposition, a serial killer story, and complete fantasy. As much as I wanted to love this film, it's a little like making Clarice Starling a psychic or putting some zombies into The Wizard of Oz. You can do it if you want to, I guess, but the conceit just becomes untenable. Perhaps this is why Kubrick passed on this project years ago.
I may have expected too much coming in. I'd had the impression that this was a dark, disturbing film, which to me it wasn't at all. I don't seek out disturbing movies, but I respect their impact when they deliver one; Perfume lacks that impact.
This is totally perfunctory and unresearched, but I feel like there are four levels on which a film can be disturbing: visceral (gore), emotional (harm comes to a character you like), psychologocial (creepy behavior; Anthony Perkins in Psycho), and ideological (some inherently wrong act, e.g. necrophilia).
Perfume really doesn't operate on any of these levels. The killer is basically animal in nature; he has a goal that can only be fulfilled through killing, but there's no anger or malice in what he does. His victims are mostly people we don't know, and the ones we do know are frankly not too likable. In the end this feels basically like a fairy tale with a slightly grisly subtext, like Hansel and Gretel. Some reviewers seemed to like it for this reason; others disliked it for this reason. So I dunno.
In films like this, I tend to want emotional impact, and it usually comes in the form of something being disturbing. Any film can contain a resoundingly disturbing situation, even a misunderstood art film. 28 Weeks Later continued to bother me for days after I'd seen it. Perfume remains slightly interesting without really reverberating on any level, and as unique as its concept might be, it's still just a movie about an essentially emotionless guy and his metaphysical pursuit. I can see how this might be an excellent novel, but to me the film is basically an inferior Sweeney Todd.
