Overiped and overdone to the point of comedy

Maciste_Brother

Wanna see a movie which has massive close-up of nostrils?

The main character juggling perfume bottles like Tom Cruise juggles vodka bottles in COCKTAIL?

Dustin Hoffman overacting?

A massive orgy that takes place in an open square during the light of day?

Pure love causing spontaneous cannibalism?

Well, PERFUME is the movie for you.

Even with all its grotesque imagery and ideas, I giggled nonstop while watching this overdone film. It's so bent on putting off people with a series of grim images and story-line that it created the opposite effect. It ended up looking like a Disney ride through misery. The idea is hopelessly silly: a guy with a super olfactory sense receptor is driven to murder because he wants to bottle women's scent because no one likes him. The director actually shows us, just in case we missed the point, massive close ups of Grenouille's nostrils or him walking around sniffing things. Because of the unusual plot, this story desperately needed subtlety and instead it got something from the Paul (subtle as a sledgehammer) Verhoeven school of film-making. It hits you on the head, repeatedly, that Grenouille is like the 6 million dollar man with a bionic nose. It doesn't help that the story follows this sad character from his birth to his eventual death, subsequently empathizing with this serial killer of sorts as it painfully shows us, in grand details, why he's such a tormented soul.

The direction was all wrong. Because the story was, hmm, unusual, the director thought that it needed some narration to tell us stupid viewers what was going on. The narration, by John Hurt, was grating, sounding like a kindergarten teacher reading a gross Brothers Grimm story to his pupils.

"The children sensed there was something about him..." the narration went on slavishly over every little detail about Grenouille's life. I laughed out loud anytime I heard these groaners.

If hearing the pedantic voice of John Hurt wasn't bad enough, the film also stars Dustin Hoffman, in full makeup and overacting mode. Honestly, the film never had a chance with these two annoying elements but the infantile direction and the exceptionally misogynistic tone of this non-story are what really sank this thing into miasma of rotten films.

score 1/10

Maciste_Brother 15 January 2008

Reprint: https://www.imdb.com/review/rw1800784/