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Jan. 4th, 2007 09:56 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beetigerI went to see the movie Perfume last night, at a special showing followed by a Q & A with Chandler Burr, the perfume reviewer for the New York Times. I'd enjoyed Susskind's book, with its florid descriptions of scent, and was curious to see how that was translated to the screen. I've also (as I'm sure anyone who is reading this journal knows) had something of an obsession with scent for a long time, and an obsession with perfuming more recently, so I had to go.
I put on BPAL Fortunato when I got into the theatre, having been running too late to do it before, and having fallen in love with it earlier in the day, and somehow feeling that it read 18th century to me. I probably shouldn't have – it turned out not to be the right scent for the film at all, and I don't know if the reason that the woman sitting next to me in the crowded theatre, who left (presumably for the restroom) in the first 15 minutes and didn't come back, vacated her seat because I'd made the area stink of berries and patchouli, or if she had some other reason.
The film was well done. It was long –nearly two and a half hours – but the pacing worked well nevertheless. Although there was a narrator throughout the story, there were pretty much no verbal descriptions of scent beyond the basic statement of what something was –fish, rock, leather. Everything was done with gorgeous visuals, both the ones of literal places and things like the tannery, the fish market, the streets of Paris, or the lavender fields of Grasse, and the ones that were imagined when a perfume bottle was opened, paradisaical fields of flowers and lovers whispering in your ear. It pretty much relies on the viewer doing a sort of synaesthetic transfer of the bold visual images to the realm of scent. At least for me, it worked.
The ending (for those who may have read the book; I won't spoil it directly for the rest of you) was pretty much as incongruous at it was in the book, but somehow worked a little bit better. The style of the narration throughout frames the story more as a fairy tale, a "legend" of the sort Grenouille claims not to understand earlier in the film, rather than an imaginary history of 18th century France, and in that context it's easier to stomach the outcome of the story. The narrator reads like a fan of Grenouille, kind of the way that there are fans of Charles Manson or the Zodiac killer. He's sharing a life-as-narrative, lovingly telling about someone who is profoundly alien, and somehow special and perhaps admirable for it despite his dreadful acts.
Overall, a stunning film. I highly recommend it. It's billed as a thriller, and certainly there are girls being murdered all over the place, and a special girl that you're sure is going to go at some point and you are just waiting for the moment. But it didn't seem like a thriller at all to me – that wasn't the pacing, or the focus. It was a portrait, a beautiful portrait of someone unimaginably beautiful and hideous at the same time. And yes, the perfumery bits were pretty accurate, as far as I could tell.
The discussion with Chandler Burr was something of a disappointment. He was very engaging, and had a lot to say, but he didn't really talk about the movie at all, and he only talked about the associated perfume coffret enough to say that the idea of pumping the scents into the theatre, as was done in Paris, was a disaster because the scents didn't dissipate quickly enough, and to show a few of the scents to the interviewer to sniff, but not to the audience. He talked a little about the differences between French and Japanese perfumery styles (the French like a perfume that develops on the skin over time; the Japanese like a perfume that's very stable in character and just fades as a whole over time), and a little about his book. The very few questions he took from the audience were silly ones – a guy ranting about how the film was too long, someone trying to ask "what is your favorite perfume" in a creative way, and someone asking about wine which led to Burr going on a long rant about how wine reviewing is silly , because wine is a natural product and not a constructed one. I bought his book and got him to sign it.
And although I felt like a total dork asking, he had the coffret out and I couldn't help myself. I asked if I could go ahead and sniff “Virgin No. 1”, the scent in the coffret that's supposed to be the one that goes with the scenes about perfume made from young girls. I read that the perfumers used headspace analysis of the area around the bellybuttons of young women in order to construct it. Burr seemed extremely nonchalant about it--”oh, is that one of the things that's in there?” -- but let me go ahead and make a blotter stick for myself to smell. It's very odd. It needs to be smelled at a little distance, not right up to your nose, and it smells kind of like what the top of a baby's head would smell like if it kind of kept that character into its postpubescent years, or possibly what a person would smell like if they were transformed into a flower. It's a smell that's very human and yet strangely alien at the same time, the smell of something that just does not exist, but is at the same time very much from nature. The uncanny valley of scent, I think. I've still got the blotter stick in a baggie. The first of you to respond that you want it can have it.
He didn't have a bottle of Aura there, the scent from the coffret that will be sold separately, the one that's built to not make any sense at all until it blossoms on the skin of the individual wearer, and he didn't end up having time to take my question concerning it. I'll probably try to get some when it launes, if I can get a smallish amount at a reasonable price, as I'm profoundly curious about it. My desire to get the rest of the coffret has faded, though. My curiosity is satisfied there.
I put on BPAL Fortunato when I got into the theatre, having been running too late to do it before, and having fallen in love with it earlier in the day, and somehow feeling that it read 18th century to me. I probably shouldn't have – it turned out not to be the right scent for the film at all, and I don't know if the reason that the woman sitting next to me in the crowded theatre, who left (presumably for the restroom) in the first 15 minutes and didn't come back, vacated her seat because I'd made the area stink of berries and patchouli, or if she had some other reason.
The film was well done. It was long –nearly two and a half hours – but the pacing worked well nevertheless. Although there was a narrator throughout the story, there were pretty much no verbal descriptions of scent beyond the basic statement of what something was –fish, rock, leather. Everything was done with gorgeous visuals, both the ones of literal places and things like the tannery, the fish market, the streets of Paris, or the lavender fields of Grasse, and the ones that were imagined when a perfume bottle was opened, paradisaical fields of flowers and lovers whispering in your ear. It pretty much relies on the viewer doing a sort of synaesthetic transfer of the bold visual images to the realm of scent. At least for me, it worked.
The ending (for those who may have read the book; I won't spoil it directly for the rest of you) was pretty much as incongruous at it was in the book, but somehow worked a little bit better. The style of the narration throughout frames the story more as a fairy tale, a "legend" of the sort Grenouille claims not to understand earlier in the film, rather than an imaginary history of 18th century France, and in that context it's easier to stomach the outcome of the story. The narrator reads like a fan of Grenouille, kind of the way that there are fans of Charles Manson or the Zodiac killer. He's sharing a life-as-narrative, lovingly telling about someone who is profoundly alien, and somehow special and perhaps admirable for it despite his dreadful acts.
Overall, a stunning film. I highly recommend it. It's billed as a thriller, and certainly there are girls being murdered all over the place, and a special girl that you're sure is going to go at some point and you are just waiting for the moment. But it didn't seem like a thriller at all to me – that wasn't the pacing, or the focus. It was a portrait, a beautiful portrait of someone unimaginably beautiful and hideous at the same time. And yes, the perfumery bits were pretty accurate, as far as I could tell.
The discussion with Chandler Burr was something of a disappointment. He was very engaging, and had a lot to say, but he didn't really talk about the movie at all, and he only talked about the associated perfume coffret enough to say that the idea of pumping the scents into the theatre, as was done in Paris, was a disaster because the scents didn't dissipate quickly enough, and to show a few of the scents to the interviewer to sniff, but not to the audience. He talked a little about the differences between French and Japanese perfumery styles (the French like a perfume that develops on the skin over time; the Japanese like a perfume that's very stable in character and just fades as a whole over time), and a little about his book. The very few questions he took from the audience were silly ones – a guy ranting about how the film was too long, someone trying to ask "what is your favorite perfume" in a creative way, and someone asking about wine which led to Burr going on a long rant about how wine reviewing is silly , because wine is a natural product and not a constructed one. I bought his book and got him to sign it.
And although I felt like a total dork asking, he had the coffret out and I couldn't help myself. I asked if I could go ahead and sniff “Virgin No. 1”, the scent in the coffret that's supposed to be the one that goes with the scenes about perfume made from young girls. I read that the perfumers used headspace analysis of the area around the bellybuttons of young women in order to construct it. Burr seemed extremely nonchalant about it--”oh, is that one of the things that's in there?” -- but let me go ahead and make a blotter stick for myself to smell. It's very odd. It needs to be smelled at a little distance, not right up to your nose, and it smells kind of like what the top of a baby's head would smell like if it kind of kept that character into its postpubescent years, or possibly what a person would smell like if they were transformed into a flower. It's a smell that's very human and yet strangely alien at the same time, the smell of something that just does not exist, but is at the same time very much from nature. The uncanny valley of scent, I think. I've still got the blotter stick in a baggie. The first of you to respond that you want it can have it.
He didn't have a bottle of Aura there, the scent from the coffret that will be sold separately, the one that's built to not make any sense at all until it blossoms on the skin of the individual wearer, and he didn't end up having time to take my question concerning it. I'll probably try to get some when it launes, if I can get a smallish amount at a reasonable price, as I'm profoundly curious about it. My desire to get the rest of the coffret has faded, though. My curiosity is satisfied there.
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no subject
Date: 2007-01-04 04:34 pm (UTC)