Alan Rickman accepts his Golden Thumb Award and throws a thumbs up to the Ebertfest Audience. Media Credit: Blake Stubbs.

So we just got out of watching Perfume: The Story of a Murderer and it was phenomenal. It is such an inexplicable film, that it’s hard to give a brief run down of it, I’ll try, but I urge you to watch it because it’s definitely one that will keeping you thinking about it long after you see it.

Here’s my attempt at a simply outline: We follow a young man in France who has an extraordinary ability to smell things, and this ability leads him down a path of obsession, destruction, and ambiguous actions as he searches for a way to capture the ultimate essence.

But there is so much more, and so many layers to the film that one viewing doesn’t do it justice.

What I can talk about with some certainty, however, is the superb cinematography. This film is centered around smells, and it is portrayed so elegantly—the style, color choices, framing all combine to create a visual tone that goes far beyond what words can describe. It gives you a feeling, an essence, an imagination of smells via its imagery that’s so stunning some people felt like they could smell what they saw. To me it was more of a ghost, a haunting of a smell that roused my imagination. The picture at times was very eerie, defying genre labels, and while watching it I couldn’t help but think about how complex the story was, all the multiple levels of interpretation that come into play—it’s an academic’s dream (or nightmare).

There are some movies that make you take a step back and say, “Wow, what did I just see?!” And these are the movies that I love because they challenge us; they make us think about not only the story, but our relationship to the movie, our roles as spectators. How do I fit in? What was it that made me enjoy it? It makes you appreciate the art, the craft of filmmaking on another level.

After the show, Alan Rickman was on the panel and I was struck by one of the things he said. (Well actually I was impressed by a lot of what he had to say about acting on stage and on film, on life, on Die Hard, etc.) But this film was overlooked in the States, despite its success in Europe, and he mentioned that he thinks of Perfume as “a big movie that celebrates unnamable things.” I find that comforting in a sense; that a big movie can take on such complex ideas. It’s certainly a noodle-scratcher but in such a beautiful and fun way, that I can’t help but feel appreciative of artists who produce such quality work.

This entry was posted on Friday, April 27th, 2007 at 1:58 am and is filed under Ebertfest. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.