” The perfume ” (1985) by Patrick Suskind is a dramatic and bloody novel that tells the troubled life of the young and lonely Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, in eighteenth-century France.
The narration is particular because the author maximizes the olfactory descriptions, which come from the nose of the protagonist, rather than the visual ones the reader is usually used to.
Both Martin Scorsese and Stanley Kubrick took an interest in the singular story but failed to obtain the film rights, which Suskind granted only in 2001 to director Tom Tykwer, who shot the film entitled Perfume – The Story of a Murderer, released in 2006.
The protagonist is precisely Jean-Baptiste (Ben Whishaw in the film), a poor boy whose existence has been marked by bad luck since birth: his mother, a Parisian fishwife, gives birth to him under the fish counter at the market and leaves him between waste. The newborn survives and the mother is hanged on charges of infanticide. Jean-Baptiste is entrusted to the orphanage of the greedy Madame Gaillard who, after years, sells him to the owner of a tannery.
Always alone, indifferent to others and immune to feelings, the little one works as a slave until adolescence. Jean-Baptiste, however, is endowed with a gift, which is also a condemnation: he has a very strong sensitivity to the smells of others but does not perceive his own smell, and this makes him unable to feel emotions. As he grows up, he will learn to empower his gift and to distinguish smells and discern the scents from the smells of a Paris submerged by waste.
The turning point comes with the chance meeting with a girl, a young beggar: for the first time the boy catches her feminine scent and, eager to smell the young woman, kills her. Without any repentance, Jean-Baptiste decides that his life should be devoted to the search for perfumes.
He thus becomes an apprentice perfumer of Giuseppe Baldini (Dustin Hoffman in the film). The boy’s skills are admirable: he is able to distinguish all the components of fashionable perfumes and reproduce them, improving them. Baldini’s workshop registers enormous success thanks to the creations of Jean-Baptiste, who remains anonymous, however, allowing the master to take all the credit.
Jean-Battiste wants to learn new perfume creation techniques and thus goes to Grasse, in Provence, through a long journey of suffering that will also lead him to live in isolation in a cave before arriving at his destination. Loneliness seems to undermine his already precarious psychological equilibrium, so much so that, once in Grasse, he decides to create a perfume that reproduces the human smell in order to exercise control over men.
Having learned the technique of enfleurage (the extraction of odors by immersion in fat), he goes in search of the “raw material” for his crazy plan, or twenty-five girls. After killing them, he extracts the essence from their bodies with enfleurage and obtains the coveted perfume. The series of heinous crimes, meanwhile, unleashed panic in the town and only after much research did the police arrest Jean-Baptiste. The boy escapes death thanks to his scent, with which he manages to gain control over the crowd. With this powerful weapon he could achieve anything and go anywhere, but Jean-Baptiste chooses to return to Paris and end his life, knowing that he can never have a normal life due to his gift.
The story is certainly visionary, as well as distressing, and well describes the madness that subjugates the protagonist’s mind. The trail of deaths he leaves behind is disturbing, as anyone who has contact with him, in one way or another, dies.
Furthermore, 18th-century France leaps to the reader’s attention with a wealth of details describing daily life made up of great contrasts: on the one hand, the poor beggars, peddlers and drunkards who live in stinking streets in disastrous hygienic conditions; from above, the aristocratic class who in those decades discovered the world of cosmetics, personal care and perfumes.
Given these assumptions, I just wonder what magnificent film could have come from the mind of a great director like Kubrick – without detracting from Scorsese – with such a story in hand. We still have Tykwer’s film, which is a faithful reproduction of the novel, but nothing more. Valentina Morlacchi
