The parfume, the story of a murderer

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Movie
Original title The parfume, the story of a murderer
Country of production Germany , Spain , USA
original language English
Publishing year 2006
length 147 minutes
Age rating FSK 12
JMK 14
Rod
Director Tom Tykwer
script Andrew Birkin
Bernd Eichinger
Tom Tykwer
production Bernd Eichinger
music Reinhold Heil
Johnny Klimek
Tom Tykwer
camera Frank Griebe
cut Alexander Berner
occupation
synchronization

Perfume - The Story of a Murderer is a fiction film directed by the German director Tom Tykwer from 2006. It is based on the novel of the same name by Patrick Süskind . It was produced by Constantin Film , Castelao Producciones SA, Nouvelles Éditions de Films and the VIP 4 media fund, among others . It was released in theaters in Germany on September 14, 2006. With a budget of over 50 million euros, it is one of the most expensive German film productions.

action

France in the 18th century: A young man in the southern French city of Grasse is dragged out of his dungeon cell onto the balcony of the town hall, in front of which the angry townspeople are waiting on the market square for their death sentences for multiple murders to be carried out.

A flashback leads to the bestial smelly market in Paris , where on July 17, 1738 a fishmonger gives birth to a son under her sales table. The mother does not take care of him, leaves him naked and unsupervised in the garbage and suspects that he is a “half” or stillborn like many of her children before. But when the baby, brought to life by the stench of its surroundings, suddenly begins to scream and the market visitors discover the bloody bundle, the mother tries in vain to flee from the indignant crowd. She is charged with attempted child murder , sentenced to hang up and executed.

The child comes into state care, is baptized and given the name Jean-Baptiste Grenouille. He ends up in the home of Madame Gaillard, a foster mother who takes in foster children for a fee. When one of the home boys approaches the baby with his hand to check whether it is still alive, it suddenly grabs the baby's index finger, pulls it firmly and begins to smell it intensely. The baby seems scary to the children and they decide to suffocate little Grenouille with a blanket. But again he makes himself noticeable by screaming loudly so that Madame Gaillard can save him just in time. So he grows up, gets older and opens up the world almost exclusively through his sense of smell . He soon becomes aware of his great talent for being able to pick up and differentiate scents with his nose from a greater distance. At the age of six, he had already opened up his surroundings olfactory down to the smallest detail.

At the age of thirteen, Madame Gaillard sold him to the brutal tanner Grimal. After she handed in Grenouille and was glad to have gotten rid of this mysterious, strange boy, her throat was slit in an alley by two robberies.

After Grenouille had long proven himself in the tannery, he was allowed to deliver his goods to the city. In the streets of Paris he encounters a universe of scents. Grenouille's sense of smell refines and he discovers that the scent of a young girl who sells mirabelle plums is particularly appealing to him. Grenouille follows the girl, she is frightened and wants to scream, but he covers her mouth because passers-by are passing by at this moment and he is in danger of being discovered. When he releases his hand from her mouth shortly afterwards, he sees that he involuntarily suffocated the girl. He undresses her, greedily soaks up the aroma of the dead with his nose and falls into great despair when he realizes that her scent disappears with her death. This is where the desire arises in him to be able to capture volatile fragrances permanently.

At that time, the successful perfumer Pelissier launched a perfume called Amor and Psyche . Thereupon his competitor, the worn-out Italian perfumer Giuseppe Baldini, is commissioned by Count Véramont to create a new fragrance as well, and it should be just as good as "Amor and Psyche". Baldini retires to his laboratory to copy the scent, drawing inspiration from a vial his rival has already secretly acquired. He tries to find out which essences are hidden in it and to grasp their mixture and formula, but fails.

At that moment, Grenouille appears and has been given the task of delivering a shipment of leather to Baldini. Grenouille immediately smells that Baldini has experimented with "Amor and Psyche" and offers to mix it for him. Baldini reacts arrogantly and dismissively at first. Finally he gives Grenouille a chance because he is convinced that it will fail and wants to teach him a lesson. Grenouille disregards all the rules of the art during production, but he manages to mix the scent of "Cupid and Psyche" right away. Baldini is baffled by this - and visibly dejected by the fact that he is clearly inferior to the newcomer. Grenouille then even created a much improved version of the perfume. However, Baldini is too confused to consider. As he walks, Grenouille asks him to be allowed to do an apprenticeship with him so that he can learn how to preserve fragrances. Baldini, still dazed, postpones the decision.

Only after Grenouille has left does Baldini calmly try the new perfume - and is overwhelmed. He appeared the next day at Grimal and bought Grenouille for 50 francs. Even Grimal is not allowed to enjoy this sale for a long time: after visiting an inn, he stumbles while drunk, hits his head and falls into the Seine .

Grenouille helps Baldini's fragrance store with his flair for imaginative perfume creations. From his teacher he acquired the knowledge of the harmonic chords of the fragrances and learned of the legend of a certain “perfect perfume”, the 13th essence of which could never be determined. He also learns how to use distillation to capture scents permanently. He then tried in vain to distill scents from glass, from copper and even from Baldini's cat. Baldini is horrified and explains to him that you cannot distill everything. Grenouille - whose goal is still to be able to capture all volatile fragrances - is shocked by this hint and falls ill. Baldini tells him at his bedside about the town of Grasse in the south of France, where the best perfumers in the world work and know the secret of preserving fragrances through enfleurage . Grenouille recovers from his illness through this hope and leaves Paris with a journeyman's letter that Baldini wrote for him - in exchange for 100 new perfume formulas.

Just like Madame Gaillard and Grimal, Baldini did not enjoy his lucrative trade for long: the following night his house, which was located on a bridge over the Seine, collapsed and buried him, his wife and all his belongings in the river.

Grenouille meanwhile moves south in the morning. On the Plomb du Cantal , a mountain in the Massif Central , Grenouille discovers a cave in which he settles in complete seclusion for a long time. Far from all the annoying smells of the outside world, he finds out to his horror that he has no odor of its own.

He continues his journey to Grasse, is overtaken by a carriage with a girl on the way, and notices a scent in her that is just as delicious as that of the killed mirabelle plum seller in Paris. Grenouille follows her scent of Grasse to her house. More and more carried away by her scent, he also learns your name here: Laure Richis.

He succeeds in finding work as a journeyman in the small perfume studio of the widow Arnulfi and her journeyman Dominique Druot. Here Grenouille learns the art of enfleurage: With that he finally has the means to be able to preserve the fragrances of fragrant girls.

He tries to achieve this goal without killing anyone: He pays a prostitute to be able to take off her scent. However, this is increasingly disgusted by Grenouille's strange behavior and greasy process. When she finally wants to flee, Grenouille kills her. He cuts her hair for optimal enfleurage and performs the procedure on her still warm body. With this he succeeds: for the first time he can capture the scent of a girl.

From then on, Grenouille purposefully roamed the area around Grasse as a murderer. More and more girls are being killed by him and later found naked and bald. He wants to extract thirteen essences from their fragrances, which will serve as the basis for “the perfect perfume”.

The public is appalled by the murders. When even a curfew cannot stop the killing, a bishop is summoned to excommunicate the unknown murderer . During the ceremony, the arrest of the alleged perpetrator is announced in a nearby town. However, his confession was obtained under torture and therefore contains contradictions. Only Antoine Richis, Laures father, notices these inconsistencies and does not trust the peace. He puts himself in the position of the murderer and comes to the conclusion that this must be a collector of beautiful virgins, which Laure, as the most beautiful girl far and wide, is still missing in his collection.

Driven by panic, Richis stages a trip to Grenoble to marry Laure so that she no longer fits into the murderer's “booty scheme”. Until the wedding, she should be brought to a monastery for her safety. Grenouille follows father and daughter. Despite Richi's diversionary maneuvers, he manages to find Laures whereabouts in an inn and to kill her. In this way he succeeds in preserving and stealing its fragrance, the 13th ingredient for his essence, with the help of enfleurage.

Shortly after this crime, he was tracked down and taken prisoner. However, he does not reveal the motive for his murders to the lawyers. In the torture chamber, he merely confesses that he “needed” the girls. He is convicted and is to be executed on April 17, 1766. According to the horror of his deeds, his punishment is imposed: all of his bones, tied to a wooden cross, are to be smashed with a heavy iron rod. The mood against him is so heated that "all otherwise usual acts of grace [...] the executioner are expressly prohibited".

The execution turns into its opposite, because Grenouille manages to arouse the audience's sympathy and love for him (and then for one another) with the help of his now “perfect perfume”. Seized by tender affection, young and old undress and fall in a love orgy at the feet of the "angel" Grenouille. Even Richis, just hateful for merciless revenge, hugs his daughter's murderer, calls him his son and ruefully asks Grenouille for forgiveness. In view of the general fraternization, he wistfully remembers the mirabelle girl of yore, finally turns away crying and leaves the city at dawn.

A little later, the innocent perfumer Dominique Druot was executed in his place. He confessed to his alleged deeds under torture after Grenouille's clothes and hairs of the girls who had been killed were found in his shed.

Grenouille, however, returns to his birthplace, the market in Paris, where at night he goes to the poorest of the poor and pours the rest of his perfume over his eyes. Here, too, the quarreling and quarreling homeless people are so inflamed by Grenouille's love-pouring perfume that they rush at him enthusiastically and eat him completely until only his clothes remain, which are taken away by other people the next day.

History of origin

The film is based on the novel of the same name by the German writer Patrick Süskind . When it was published in 1985, Das Parfum garnered high praise from critics and reading audiences and was compared to Erich Maria Remarque's In the West (1928/29) in terms of its worldwide success . The novel stayed on the bestseller lists for nine years and has sold 20 million times to date. Numerous renowned directors such as Martin Scorsese and Miloš Forman were interested in the film adaptation of the material. Names like Ridley Scott or Tim Burton were also associated with the project, but Patrick Süskind hesitated for a long time to sell the film rights to his novel.

In 2001, Süskind finally transferred the film rights to Das Parfum for an estimated ten million euros to the German director and producer Bernd Eichinger , who had been working on the project for several years. In his script for the Helmut Dietl film Rossini (1997), Süskind reflects this: The film character of the extremely shy author (played by Joachim Król ) refuses to have his book made into a film for a lot of money. The producer (played by Heiner Lauterbach ) was created by Süskind almost as an image of Eichinger.

The pre-production of the film took two and a half years. Eichinger decided to direct Tom Tykwer, who made his breakthrough in 1998 with Run Lola Run . Tykwer wrote the screenplay for the film together with Eichinger, co-producer Andrew Birkin and screenwriter Caroline Thompson . While renowned actors such as Dustin Hoffman or Alan Rickman play supporting roles, the rather unknown British theater and film actor Ben Whishaw was hired for the lead role of Jean-Baptiste Grenouille . Originally, actors Leonardo DiCaprio and Orlando Bloom were considered for the lead role in Grenouille. For Whishaw, the character posed a particular challenge because, as an olfactory genius, she is mainly dependent on her gestures and facial expressions. As in the novel, Grenouille hardly has any text to speak in the film.

Filming began on July 12, 2005 and was completed within 67 days of shooting in October of the same year. The filming locations included Bavaria Film in Munich and Provence in France , where Süskind's novel is partially set and where pre-production had already started in June 2005. The sequences that take place in Paris at the beginning of the novel were created in Barcelona , Spain . 17 tons of fish entrails, clay, straw as well as 260 employees and a hundred different film motifs were necessary to reproduce 18th century Paris as faithfully as possible. The film was also shot in Girona , Spain , where some of the scenes that take place in Grasse were shot. According to Bernd Eichinger, footage was shot for almost 30 hours. With preparation and shooting, the film project took three years to complete.

The production cost of Perfume - The Story of a Murderer is estimated at around 60 million euros, although it was originally estimated at 47 million euros. The large-scale production was also financially supported by the North Rhine-Westphalia Film Foundation (approx. 750,000 euros), the FilmFernsehFonds Bayern (approx. 1.6 million euros) as well as the Bavarian Banking Fund (BBF) and the Filmförderungsanstalt (approx. One million euros each). The patroness of FC Basel , Gisela Oeri , is said to have contributed ten million Swiss francs to the production costs.

background

  • The score for Perfume - The Story of a Murderer. was recorded for five days in the Brandenburger Theater by the Brandenburg Symphony Orchestra based there and recorded on several audio tracks by sound engineer Wolfgang Loos , professor at the University of the Arts in Berlin . The post-production took place in Loos' Traumton -Studio in Berlin-Spandau . However, large parts of the soundtrack were later re-recorded by the Berliner Philharmoniker under the conductor Simon Rattle .
  • Other directors who were traded for the project were u. a. also the French directors Jean-Jacques Annaud and Jean-Pierre Jeunet . According to media reports, the American Julian Schnabel is said to have written a script in which Johnny Depp was intended as Grenouille . In addition, Klaus Kinski was interested in a film adaptation in the late 1980s.
  • The German rental and purchase DVD is equipped with a new type of copy protection which can lead to playback problems on many PCs and standalone DVD players. The DVD therefore no longer fully complies with the DVD standards.
  • A German HD DVD edition was initially released in 2006 . A Blu-ray disc was also released later.
  • The audio description of the film was made in 2007 and can also be found on the DVD. The image descriptions are spoken by Uta-Maria Torp.
  • On the film was Sissel Tolaas with their company IFF involved.
  • Four extensive passages of the book are not dealt with in the film: the stay with Father Terrier, Baldini's long criticism of the "good old days" and the meeting with the Marquis de la Taillade-Espinasse and watching Laure Richis playing in the garden, which is replaced by a passing carriage.

synchronization

reception

Reviews

The lexicon of international films stated: “With his film adaptation, director Tom Tykwer has succeeded in creating visually stunning entertainment that, like the novel, focuses primarily on the shimmering surface of the material, while characters and historical backgrounds are outlined but not deepened. The creative perfection and sensuality of the film ensure that there are no lengths. "

Katja Nicodemus judged for Die Zeit : “It could have been a great kitsch opera, a gloomy Leichenfledderer story, a brutal serial killer film. It is all the stranger that Eichinger and Tykwer spent a lot of time producing such a staid work, a film that shrinks to a few positions in the costume museum when you leave the cinema. "

According to the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung , Ben Whishaw was “not a bad choice as Grenouille: not handsome, not too coarse - and unfortunately without the slightest hint of demonia […] The perfume makes a powerful impression at first glance, it shows its show values ​​and withers already light in the middle note when the first iconoclasm has subsided; it becomes staid and sterile in all its opulence. What remains as a base note, that is dignified boredom, that is the solid novel filming standard. "

FACTS criticized a similar point: The portrayal of Grenouille was played down in comparison to the book (“Schaul wird Liebeskasper”), and that the character of the main character was damaged - in the book Grenouille was “uncompromisingly abnormal” - but in the film it was played with whether a love would arise between Grenouille and one of the virgins he kills. Tykwer justified this with the preferences of the audience.

Other critics speak of a "literary film adaptation that appears brilliant in its appearance, has remained largely true to the original, but nevertheless shows a general difficulty: namely that the cinematic processing of bestsellers is always an interpretation of the original and that inevitably has a lot to offer Content is lost. Sometimes also very central aspects. "

Visitor numbers

Visitors after years
country 2006 2007 2006 + 2007
Germany 5,480,600 108,542 5,589,217
Spain 1,184,849 179,542 1,364,391
France 921.920 - 921.920
Austria 598,884 1,588 600,472
Italy 531.188 2,480 533,668
Poland - 503,788 503,788
Switzerland 389.259 909 390.168
Great Britain 163,671 212.068 375.739
United States - 312.122 312.122
Belgium 204.251 15,510 219.761
Netherlands 103,480 108,619 212.099

In Germany , the film opened in cinemas on September 14, 2006 and immediately topped the charts with around one million viewers on the opening weekend. In German-speaking Switzerland , where the film was released in cinemas on the same day, 53,000 tickets sold were enough for first place, and in Austria (start: September 15) it was also able to take the lead with around 131,000 viewers. Almost 5.6 million viewers in Germany saw the film within a year. This makes it one of the 20 most successful German films in German cinemas . (The audience count in German cinemas has been taking place since 1968). The film had more than 11.6 million viewers across Europe. It was by far the most successful in Spain (nearly 1.4 million) and France (a good 900,000 viewers). In the USA 312,000 visitors were counted. The film grossed over $ 135 million worldwide.

Awards

2006:

2007:

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Certificate of Release for Perfume - The Story of a Murderer . Voluntary self-regulation of the film industry , August 2006 (PDF; test number: 107 061 K).
  2. ↑ Age rating for Perfume - The Story of a Murderer . Youth Media Commission .
  3. ↑ Swiss premiere of “Das Parfum”. Nachrichten.ch
  4. ↑ Perfume - The story of a murderer in the Hörfilm database of Hörfilm e. V.
  5. ↑ The Perfume - The Story of a Murderer. In: Lexicon of International Films . Film service , accessed March 2, 2017 .Template: LdiF / Maintenance / Access used 
  6. ↑ Katja Nicodemus : A large nose theater . In: Die Zeit , No. 35/2006.
  7. ↑ Peter Körte: Immune to Evil: "The Perfume" . In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung , September 13, 2006.
  8. ↑ FACTS , No. 36/2006; 7th of September.
  9. ↑ The perfume . Filmstarts.de
  10. ↑ Perfume - The Story of a Murderer . Box Office Mojo. Retrieved January 26, 2011.