Orange blossom, lemon, rosemary, sauerkraut, clove, rose... When these tempting names are entangled in the lips and teeth, the air seems to be filled with scents . Open a bottle of perfume, when dozens of scents are scattered like an orchestra, the experience and feeling it brings are not just olfactory. A fragrance can make people happy or sad, relaxed or excited; a bottle of perfume can change or rewrite a person's mood to a large extent, and can bring people a world concentrated in a small crystal bottle.
This may be why the German writer Pa Süskind chose perfume and a legend of a smell wizard as the description of the novel, and this is the work that exudes a strange fragrance: "Perfume - The Story of a Murderer" . Grenouille, the protagonist of the novel, was born without body odor, but he was born for smell: he has an amazing ability to distinguish smells, and can smell almost everything in the world. Making a bottle of the best perfume in the world is the most important and only pursuit of his life.
To achieve this goal, Grenouille survived humbly like a flat flea. He took every opportunity to learn how to extract and retain scents. In order to fulfill his ultimate dream, in order to inhale the body fragrance of girls, which is extremely rare but the most wonderful fragrance in the world, Gray Norton killed 26 girls. He made some of the best and most amazing perfumes in the world, and just a few drops of it turned Gray Norton into an angel in everyone's eyes, even when he was standing on the execution stand. All the desires of the onlookers were aroused by this mysterious fragrance. And Gray Norton, after seeing all the ugliness of the onlookers because of scent and desire, realizes that the perfume in his hand is enough to make him control the world, but despair. In the end, after pouring the magic perfume, a whole bottle, on him in a market in Paris, where he was born, he was eaten by a group of people as angels of love. "They were especially proud that for the first time they had done something out of love." This sentence completes the book.
With the charm of perfume, delicate plot, and profound meaning, Suskind's novels are loved by countless people. However, it wasn't made into a movie until 2006, more than a decade after its release. It's no wonder, originally, the adaptation of a famous novel requires the screenwriter and director to accurately grasp and summarize the content of the original book; and the adaptation of this novel has a problem that has always been in front of many eager directors: how to use video Express the world of smell in the novel. After all, in the book, the author uses his flowery brush to successfully construct a kingdom that appeals to the sense of smell: the markets and streets of Paris are stinking, the spice shops are full of various scents, and the fresh air flows The wilderness... Compared with words, it is really difficult for light and shadow to express this. It is for this reason that Kubrick, a generation of movie giants, gave up the idea of making this novel into a movie.
I watched the film with curiosity and scrutiny almost at the same time. It's far from easy to please a die-hard reader who knows every plot, or even every dialogue, by heart.
Fortunately, director Tom Tykwer has a pretty perfect answer for all "Perfume fans". The slight flap of Gray Norton's nose already told the audience that he had found the scent. The interlacing of scenes and the changes of light and shade also make people immersive. It can be said that the picture, like the text, fully arouses people's imagination about the smell.
What is commendable is the film's grasp of the original work: it is not completely loyal to the original work - that will only produce a restrained and lifeless work; nor does it make extensive deletions from the original work - it will usurp the original flavor of the novel. Time constraints and narrative requirements make the film retain the main plot clues of the original work and decisively abandon other branches. The director is very shrewd and picks out a "golden thread" from the story - love, which is the love that has been absent from Gray Norton's life. He has never been loved since birth. The people he came into contact with were merely exploiting and exploiting relationships with him, and none of them could even give him the slightest love: Madame Gallard was like this, Grima the leather worker, and Baldini the spice master. It is so. It is such a person who is always loved and indifferent who needs love the most. The film makes clear the motive for Greg Norton's murder: to create the perfect perfume, but also to love. He is infatuated with or loves those beautiful girls, and extracts the fragrance from them. It is hard to tell which of the two is the cause and the effect. It can be said that his murder was a kind of love, even a peculiar expression of his love. In other words, Gray Norton does not have the love that ordinary people have. As a person born for fragrance, his love is contained in his pursuit of fragrance. He fell in love with a girl because of the fragrance, and he killed him because of love.
A scene on the execution platform is undoubtedly the climax of the whole play. Because of the magic power of perfume, the desires of the onlookers rushed out like a flood. Standing on the stage, Gray Norton was as noble as an angel. He looked at the people under his feet and suddenly remembered the girl who cut yellow apricots—the girl he killed for the first time was also the first time he experienced the intoxicating scent of a girl. The girl, or rather, the girl who made him feel love for the first time. This girl kept popping up in his mind, and in his imagination, the girl was resurrected, she smiled at him, her eyes were full of love. Gray Norton's expression at that moment was happy, but also sad and pitiful. It was at that moment that he realized that although the perfume in his hand would allow him to control everything, it could not buy the love, the love he had been missing.
In this way, Gray Norton chose to self-destruct; in this way, the director added a love note to this bottle of unparalleled perfume. After all, every bottle of perfume needs to have a love note.
(by jellyfish, 07 spring)
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