By Sara Michelle Fetters
www.moviefreak.com
Finding a Deeper Meaning
Tykwer Makes Connections with Surrealistic Drama Perfume
It’s always great fun when a filmmaker attempts to adapt the quote-quote “unfilmable novel.” Sometimes they crash and burn spectacularly (David Lynch’s Dune). Other times they meet with alternating brilliant and frustrating incomprehension (Richard Linklater’s A Scanner Darkly). And, every now and then, they even meet with brilliance.
Such is the case with Tom Tykwer’s (Run Lola Run) adaptation of Patrick Süskind’s Perfume – The Story of a Murderer. But just because the cinematic results bordered on the spectacular, doesn’t mean a person is necessarily going to be able to absorb them all in just one sitting. “I’ve always dreamed of making films that people want to go and see again immediately,” comments the director. “My favorite films have always been the kinds where, the first time you see them, you are kind of overwhelmed trying to figure out the stories and the character. Then you realize there are so many sublevels that you send, that you know are there, but you haven’t grasped them yet. I think, traditionally, that second time to watch a movie is always the best.”
I got the opportunity to sit down with Tykwer for a few minutes after a Seattle screening of his feature and the one thing that hit me most during our brief conversation was that I wished I had another two hours discuss it with him. The film ebbs and flows like a fevered dream, an horrific nightmare that’s so poetically enthralling you just can’t take your eyes off of it even though you’re not altogether sure what it is that is actually going on. It is a movie that almost requires intense conversation and reflection afterwards, and having the man behind it in front of me, even for a precious few moments, was too rich an opportunity to ever consider passing up.
Rachel Hurd-Wood and director Tom Tykwer on the set of Perfume: The Story of a Murderer.
“Obviously I am attracted to things that are one-of-a-kind,” smiles the director. “There is nothing like Perfume. The novel itself was already a book where you felt like, ‘Okay, beyond any opinion I have of this, I never read a book like this.’ Never has a book, or any material for that matter, focused so much within a narrative concept on the world of smells. Nor have I ever encountered a protagonist I wanted to make work for a film that was so complex, and ambiguous, and ambivalent, and contradictory, yet so fascinating at the same time.”
“I love this whole fact about Jean-Baptiste Grenouille being somebody we deeply understand and at the same time, of course, being really scared of. He’s a scary guy who we completely go along with. He opens doors to some dark issues that we obviously know about, that we are all trying to ignore about ourselves partly. It’s a lot of secret desires that this movie is about, and this character is so unique in its conception.”
The complexity doesn’t exactly make it easy for an actor, and Tykwer certainly considered himself lucky when he cast young up and comer Ben Whishaw in the role. “I’m very grateful that [Ben] brought all of this complexity across,” earnestly nods the filmmaker. “There is so much of the purity and a nightmare at the same time about him. I think he is so innocent, yet at the same time so dangerous. These two notes, these seemingly schizophrenic worlds that are completely easily intertwined. You find him scary and boyish. Sweet and not dangerous, then suddenly dangerous again. I love that.”
Tykwer decides to put it even more frankly. “The single most important part of [this movie] was to find the right actor. We all knew there was no use in prepping the movie until we found the one guy who could pull this off. It was obvious that it could not be related to how famous the person was. It was really a task of looking as long as we had to until we found the right [man].”
“One day I was sent to see Hamlet at the Old Vic theater in London and Ben was playing Hamlet. I had this five minute moment where I realized that this really could be [Grenouille]. And then he did this audition and he presented all of these ambivalences almost immediately. There was this tension, and there was this interesting complicated sexual self image. This whole ideal about him being almost [androgynous].”
Director Tom Tykwer and Ben Whishaw on the set of Perfume: The Story of a Murderer.
“I always felt that we needed to find someone who was ambiguous in male-female things, an obvious issue for a man who wants to create the ultimate scent for himself and does through by only taking women, putting [their] scent on him, in order to attract everybody. I think there is a fantastic and fascinating theory behind that. Ben, in his physicality and in his face, there is a fine gender issue about him. But, also there is an animal, something feral about his appearance that really stays with you.”
All of this leads to the thought that the director should have been looking for an unknown to play the part all along, the nature of the character one that disallowed any outside baggage or recognition. “Yes, probably,” admits Tykwer. “It wasn’t on purpose that we were looking for somebody who was not all that famous, but later I did realize it was probably better like that. But, it was also nice to confront a [newcomer] like Ben with legendary actors at the same time. You have him and Dustin [Hoffman] in a scene where it is about an aging genius meeting the young super-genius, one of those Salieri/Motzart situations, which is beautifully reflected in the relationship between Ben and Dustin in general.”
Hoffman, of course, was a dream for the filmmaker, the legendary actor a powder keg of inspiration helping Tykwer to make the movie even more spectacular. “[Dustin] is just an actor who can do things that are extraordinary. He can go as much into the grotesque as you would like and still capture a human being in there. I mean, it’s Dustin Hoffman in there,” chortles an animated Tykwer. “He’s the man who made Tootsie work, which is probably the most impossible task ever given to any actor. That [Tootsie] isn’t completely ridiculous is just because of him, and I think it is the same thing here.”
“You have somebody who is extremely flamboyant, who could easily become a hysterical and a not very interesting character. Instead, what we wanted to do is discolor the soul of that being and have him have this real personal struggle with this [specter] of this young genius. I just love this whole Salieri depiction of him and Dustin really hit it beautifully I think.”
In the end, isn’t Perfume just a macabre journey of one man searching for love? “It is, but in the end he discovers that what he’s created doesn’t help him achieve that,” states the director. “They love the scent. They don’t love him. Nobody knows him. Nobody sees him. And that’s the phenomenal part of this whole material. Once you think about it, this whole situation has so much to do with what we observe in the present day, as much as I think they have always been around, the whole concept of celebrity and their isolation. Couple that with this mistake we all learn over the years which is an admiration of your appearance isn’t going to give you much satisfaction.”
Ben Whishaw and Dustin Hoffman in Perfume: The Story of a Murderer.
“This is a big subject, of course. What [Grenouille] really wants is to be loved. He is a nobody who is dying, at least for a moment, to be a somebody. He’s a very simple person like all of us who longs to be recognized. That’s all.”
Tykwer catches his breath, his juices flowing as he finds a way to finish off his thought before the time for our interview runs out. “There are so many social expectations every day in our lives, all the time. In the morning we wake up and we look into the mirror and we feel not pretty enough, not smart enough, not anything enough like we would want to be. So we put on something; makeup, sexy clothes, sexy hair, all that stuff; and this is our disguise.”
“What you ultimately want is for people to love you for how you feel like you really are. When somebody really looks at you in a loving way you feel like he’s looking, not at the self you are selling him, but the self that you feel like you are than that’s what transcends the banality of human existence which is something that is really worthwhile.”
“What really makes us happy, is to be in a situation where you can just talk and not think about anymore about what we are trying to sell to the person. You’re just talking, just connecting. Doing this on a deeper level. And that is what the movie is about.”
