In the house where I am currently living in Chile there are five movies on DVD, most of which I have had little to no interest in watching. They include Basic Instinct 2, Something's Gotta Give, Collateral, and a documentary on Chilean musical hero Victor Jara (well, that one I'll probably watch sometime. He's the guitarist whose hands were chopped off by Pinochet back in the day. Very interesting!). The fifth, however, was of great interest to me because it starred the girl who played Wendy in the perfectly delightful live action Peter Pan movie and this other guy from several delightful Victorian period romances I had recently seen. So I figured Perfume: The Story of a Murderer would also be delightful. Turns out it wasn't really delightful, but very ridiculous. Unbelievably ridiculous. LET ME TELL YOU WHY.I didn't know anything about Perfume: The Story of a Murderer before I watched it. The DVD case was in Dutch and the menu was in Russian so they offered me no clues. I just assumed it was about a murderer, perhaps one who was also a perfumist. Turns out I was right, but also there was also SO MUCH MORE!!! So many smelly faces, dramatic stirring scenes, Dustin Hoffman in powdered wigs and with terrible accents, massive orgies, dramatic smelling scenes AND MORE. Here, watch this trailer!
The movie begins with an incredibly gross birth scene in which Jean Phillipe Grenouille's mother plops him out in a fish market in Paris and, thinking him dead, leaves him to rot among the stinky fish and guts and stuff. But he is alive! He goes to an orphanage, where he is a creepy baby and then later a creepy boy. He loves to smell stuff. Turns out he's a genius of smells, an olfactoric savant if you will. There are a lot of dramatic smelling scenes, which are always HILARIOUS because of how silly any person's face looks when they're smelling something, let alone the powdered face of Dustin Hoffman in a powdered wig FOR EXAMPLE. Grenouille grows up and continues to creep around and smell stuff. He finds a pretty, sweet-smelling lady and accidentally kills her. Whoops, now he's a murderer FOREVER!!
Then, he finds out that this lovely thing called "perfume" exists. He decides to become a perfumist, so he visits the famous perfumist Dustin Hoffman and is like "Let me show you my perfume skills" and Dustin is like "What, you are just a street rat! What would you know about GLORIOUS SCENTS!?" So Grenouille says "I'm quite good with scents, actually. I could whip up the most popular perfume in all of Paris if only you'd let me" and Dustin is like, "Okay, sure, whatever." Cue a DRAMATIC STIRRING SCENE. Dustin is like "WHOA" and then Grenouille goes "I can make an even better perfume, watch!" DRAMATIC STIRRING SCENE. He makes an even better perfume! Dustin is impressed! From then on, they work together on making perfumes. Grenouille wants Dustin to teach him how to distill the scent of a living thing, for example a human. Dustin is like "No way, not possible, not ever not now" and Grenouille is like "MAKE IT SO" and Dustin is like "Eh, well, they might know how to do it in Grasse, the perfume capital of the world." So Grenouille goes to Grasse.
While in Grasse, Grenouille starts killing all these pretty ladies so that he can preserve their scent. He uses a huge mixer this time. DRAMATIC STIRRING SCENE WITH HUGE MIXER. He has his eyes set on the pretty lady Rachel Hurd-Wood from Peter Pan, whose dad is the very protective Professor Snape. She's the last lady he needs to kill in order to make the World's Most Perfect Perfume (Dustin told him a silly story about a perfume in ancient Egypt that caused thousands of people to erupt in a mad explosion of PURE ECSTASY). After about an hour of intense and suspenseful smelling sequences, he kills her. Great! The perfume is complete!
Problem is, the people of Grasse are kind of mad at Grenouille for killing all their pretty ladies, and so they decide to hang him. BUT just as he's about to be hanged in front of an angry mob of hundreds, he UNLEASHES THE PERFUME and ALL HELL BREAKS LOOSE. For about ten minutes, everyone is throwing their hands up in the air, waving them about and going "OOOOOH WHAT IS THAT SMELL! THAT MAN MUST BE AN ANGEL!" plus a lot of rapturous, orgasmic smelly noises (throughout the movie, whenever there is smelling it is accompanied by unusually loud and orgasmic noises). Then there is a massive orgy (I assume that was what was happening; my pirated DVD had all the boobs blurred out, which was annoying because there were SO MANY boobs in this movie. The hundreds-strong orgy looked like this:
). So this goes on for about thirty minutes. It gets REALLY boring after a while. Then everyone decides to let Grenouille go because of his GLORIOUS SCENT. Having incited a massive orgy in Grasse, he moves on to Paris, where he heads straight to the rancid fish market of his birth and dumps the rest of the perfume on his head, causing the dirty street riff-raff to jump on him and EAT HIM UP. Thus ends Perfume: The Story of a Murderer.
I don't know what's weirder. What you've described or that it was CENSORED? What kind person censors a dvd and who would pirate that one? I bet the violence wasn't censored either
ReplyDeleteand Yes. It was an orgy. I checked for you. Definitely an orgy. Not some weird bubblefest that I see up there
Thanks for verifying the orgy-ness for me, Omar. Knew I could count on you!
ReplyDeleteNo, the violence was not censored. I think the pirates just did a terrible job of the pirating. They probably thought the version they were pirating was from the Netherlands (land of porn on basic cable at 10 o'clock), as the box said, instead of from a vaguely Russian location where censorship would be more en vogue, as they say. OH WELL.