I saw Perfume: The story of a murderer last night - with a little trepidation I must add as I've been a fan of the book ever since I read it around five years ago.
In short, it tells the story of Grenouille, born in the aromatic (that's the nice word) world of the Paris fish markets in the 1700s with the greatest sense of smell in the world. His gift (and his complete lack of any body odour) set him apart from others and he spends a lot of time in the world of scents - first identifying and then working out how to reproduce them.
When he finds the most beautiful, most powerful scent of all - that of a beautiful adolescent virgin, he must possess it and this is where things start to go a little pear-shaped.
I won't give much more away about the story as it is a stunningly original story, which in many ways feels like a lost fairytale, but suffice to say in the course of learning and reproducing scents, he learns the perfumer's trade to master the capturing of them. (Scents, not adolescent virgins :)
This is the story (not surprisingly) that both the book and the film told.
Obviously a film and a book are completely different beasts. You experience them in different ways and locations (socially vs on your own, in "their" environment vs yours, at a set time for a proscribed length of time vs whenever you choose and for however long you wish to make the experience last.)
While reading the book you create the sights, sounds, smells and feelings in your head, bringing your prior knowledge and experiences to bear in the re-creation of the world that the author describes. You interact with the story by imagining it.
You also get the insight of the author into the story and the world of the characters - something that can be put across in thick, hard to film paragraphs (even pages) of explanatory text, inner monologues and God-view perspectives of the action. It is often these parts that give you the true heart and soul of the story - the ideas behind it.
On the other hand, a film (particularly this one) is a big, expensive project drawing on the talents and ideas of a horde of people. It takes away your imaginings and presents the vision of the film makers in it's place. This is generally a double edged sword - I must admit that my knowledge of day to day life in 17th century France is rather lessened by not having been there (now or back then) and while the novel does a lot to create a sensation of being there, there are always gaps in the sights and sounds. (The smells and feelings of course are another matter).
Add to this the director's own personal style (Tom Tykwer - Run Lola Run) and the need to tell a story which might take you 5-10+ hours to read into a form suited to the commercial needs of the movie business and there are always going to be changes made.
(This can often work out for the best - in my mind, the film version of Fight Club - directed by David (Seven) Fincher is actually a stronger version of the story than the original novel by Chuck Palahniuk - who incidentally is a freakin' genius).
So obviously, comparing a book with a film is problematic at best. They are different beasts experienced in different ways and designed with different intentions.
Comparison is in many ways as redundant as comparing the performances of actors in
different movies in determining the winner of a best actor award. (I've always subscribed to the theory that these should be used to determine a short list and the actors should then all act the same scene in the same role to decide the winner)
Yet at the heart of both the book and the film is the story and it is in the telling of the story (factoring in all the other differing elements) that we do make a decision about the two.
Ultimately, I was a little disappointed by the film, mainly because it glossed over two of the things that I found the most interesting about the character of Grenouille. The fact that Grenouille has no smell of his own is established right from the start in the book - it sets him up as the outsider in the orphanage and drives his obsession with firstly reproducing and then inventing smells, one of the first that he creates is something for himself (partially made from cat poo) to make himself smell like an average person.
The lack of his own smell is fleetingly mentioned in the film when Grenouille spends time in a remote cave but for something which seems so pivotal to his motivations (in my mind at least), this is the only reference to it. While the cave scenes are infinitely richer in the book, they would be entirely difficult to bring to film so I can understand them being truncated but it really felt like a lost opportunity to tell a great part of the story.
The second half of the film - which follows the book into the slightly more exciting territory of the virgin smell stuff - is more emphasised as this seems to slot more easily into film conventions, particularly that of the thriller.
The ending of the book is one of the great literary endings and I was concerned briefly that the filmmakers were going to cop-out for the sake of keeping the film marketable but to their credit they came through in the end - perhaps with a slightly milder version of events than the book suggests (or perhaps that my twisted mind had invented :)
Being such a massive production (apparently the most expensive film in German history), there is a sense of the commercial imperatives in this film. Given Tom Twyker's work previously, I was expecting something more stylised and edgier (though I do give him full credit for imaginatively visually telling a story that focusses on something that the audience can't ever see) but overall it seemed quite conventional.
It would be very interesting to know what someone who hasn't read the book thinks of this film - as I've mentioned, it's rare that you find a film that matches the depth and intricacy of the book and so you try to account for that when seeing it but it's inevitable that your knowledge of one will shade your experience of the other. (I saw the film of Fight Club before I read the book).
All in all, putting the book aside, this is a pretty good film, a great story, pretty pictures and some interesting ideas. It runs fairly long (147 mins) and has some slow patches but is worth a look. The friend I saw it with was concerned that it might taint her future readings of the book by replacing her imagery but she came out feeling that it was pretty close to the way she had seen it.
(Interesting trivia - the author, Patrick Susskind, resisted requests for the rights to make a film for more than a decade and chronicled his experiences with the people chasing the rights in a satirical film called Rossini. Directors considered for the project included Martin Scorsese, Milos Forman, Ridley Scott and Tim Burton.) (Now the Tim Burton version I would love to have seen)
3.5 cushions.
Here's the trailer
