On the lawn, young folk frolicked on bed sheets strewn with rose petals. They sat dressed in neat business suits around a table bearing a cheese, which they regarded with an interest I could only imagine.

I was there once myself, during the Cannes festival, and at Sandra Schulberg's villa met les nez de Grasse, 'the noses of Grasse,' the men whose tastes enforce the standards of a global industry. In pursuit of this last ideal he becomes a gruesome murderer.īaldini tells him the world center of the perfume art is in Grasse, in Southern France, and so he walks there. Grenouille effortlessly invents perfect perfumes, but his ambition runs deeper he wants to distill the essence of copper, stone and beauty itself. In this world, perfume is like the passage of an angel - some people think, literally. Mention of the bridge evokes the genius with which director Tom Tykwer (' Run Lola Run') evokes a medieval world of gross vices, all-pervading stinks and crude appetites. Grenouille grows up as a tanner, voluptuously inhaling the world's smells, and eventually talks himself into an apprenticeship with Baldini ( Dustin Hoffman), a master perfumer, now past his prime, whose shop is on an overcrowded medieval bridge on the Seine. This last attribute is ascribed by legend to the spawn of the devil, but the movie 'Perfume: The Story of a Murderer' makes no mention of this possibility, wisely limiting itself to vile if unnamed evil. But Grenouille grows into a grim, taciturn survivor ( Ben Whishaw), who possesses two extraordinary qualities: he has the most acute sense of smell in the world, and has absolutely no scent of his own.

He falls neglected into the stinking charnel house that was Paris 300 years ago, and is nearly thrown out with the refuse.

Patrick Suskind's famous novel involves a twisted little foundling whose fishwife mother casually births him while chopping off cod heads.

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