Pefume - A Review

 

Well the story starts with a promise that it has everything big about it. Jean’s extraordinary olfactory sense calls for some phenomenal experiments allowing him to take on everything he deems essential for creating a scent so far inconceivable for human mind. Born with this terrific sense of small in the slums of 18th century France, Jean Baptiste spends the whole of his childhood in the stinking orphanage and later at a tannery. It is not until he is apprenticed at a perfumers shop in Paris that he puts his talent to an insatiable test seeking to preserve scents through berserk means including the distillation of metals and even a cat. Upon realizing that his master, Baldini won’t be of much help in producing the linchpin scent he craves for, Jean Baptiste leaves for Grasse to try out further crafts. His induction with the new method of enfleurage drives his inquisitive mind into taking it to a further level whereupon he doesn’t even budge from taking a dozen lives of the prettiest women of Grasse preserving their bodily scents into the animal fat and later distilling the fat into perfumes drop after drop. Never succumbing to the threat to his own life which has been occasioned by the terror he has caused and the subsequent search across the city, he pertinently follows the beautiful Laura Richis, the daughter of the wealthy merchant, that he believes will be his thirteenth perfume. Although a difficult target, Laure doesn’t stand a chance against jean’s unflinching pursuit and he successfully transforms this beauty into his most desired perfume using his perfected methods.

In so far as the movie aims to trap the audience’s interest, it does so with a mighty success. The melodramatic undertones of horror grow seamlessly with the plot but gradually making the otherwise artistic pursuits of the protagonist sound all the more sickly and bizarre. Nothing contributes so much to tranqulize a mind as a steady purpose but in this particular case of Jean Baptiste this steady purpose not only defies all tranquility but instead takes on a rather bestial disposition. Now under the influence of this bestial disposition he embarks upon a killing spree and does it with an irresistible temptation. His madness for his ambition and the ghastly measures he adopts do much to alienate him from the world he lives in rather than endear him to it. In this regard he seems so aptly comparable with professor Rappaccini, a character from Hawthorne’s story ‘Rappaccini’s Daughter’. The professor rears his own daughter among the deadliest plants in his own garden in pursuit of his ambition to create the most poisonous plant species. His relentless craze for poison renders his only daughter equally poisonous thereby making her socially misfit. No antidote in the world can now cure her of this pestilence as this poison has constituted the fabric of her life and existence. That’s why when her lover, in the rightest of his mind, administers an antidote to help her regain the normal human existence, she takes it just to reciprocate her lovers goodwill, otherwise quite sure that it would kill her which it does. That’s how the story ends with a sad note leaving the reader puzzled over the matter of moral choice between taking your ambitions to inhuman ends or else, by dint of virtue, enslaving them to serve the cause of humanity.

Jean’s case is much the same in multiple shades. Instead of devising some more reasonable ways within the normal social codes to delimit the scope of his experiments, he is so slavishly governed by his pursuits that it renders him almost mad. Quite ironically the matter of extracting the best of all perfumes is meant for the human nose, but it takes the lives of many. Well on the other hand all excuses can be made for this olfactory genius since he was not schooled to such sensibilities as would have ensured his sense of morality. His life travels a very short span from suffocating stench to the most exhilarating smell of all times. Abandoned at birth by his mother, he ends up being abandoned by the whole world and ultimately dies of his own tools.