Hey, everyone. ”Moriarty” here.

This was probably the Christmas season’s biggest surprise for me. I’m not sure what I expected from it, but the film knocked me on my ass. Tykwer took one of those theoretically unfilmable novels and showed everyone exactly how to adapt it.

Great stuff, and I’m sure I’ll have more to say about it soon. For now, check out Capone’s take on the material:

Hey, everyone. Capone in Chicago here.

So earlier this week, my interview with this film's director Tom Tykver posted, and today I give you my review. Landing fairly high on my Best of 2006, the latest outstanding effort the German director (who also serves as the films co-writer and co-composer) is unlike any other film you have ever seen about a serial killer. Jean-Baptiste Genouille (played with an uneasy twitchy nervousness by Ben Whishaw) does not kill for the thrill or because some dark, traumatic even occurred in his past. If he didn't have to kill, he wouldn't. But killing beautiful women in 18th century France seems to be the only way he can find to distill and extract their scent, their essence in liquid form. And it is this distinction--along with Tykver always-present visual flare--that gives Perfume an atmosphere that is both sensual and menacing. And it is one of the few films about mass murderers in which we are actually (perhaps secretly) looking forward to each largely bloodless death, if only to see exactly what Jean-Baptiste intends to do with his collection of feminine odors. Sounds delightful, doesn't it?

Tykver is probably best known for his energetic masterpiece Run Lola Run, but Perfume calls to mind the atmosphere he generated with the film he made prior to that landmark piece of German cinema, a lesser known work called Winter Sleepers, which also dealt with death and the mystery surrounding tragic events. There is little in common between the two films in terms of plot, but the undercurrent of tension and foreboding is remarkably similar. Based on the exceedingly popular novel by Patrick Suskind, Perfume begins with an astonishing sequence that shows us the birth of Jean-Baptiste on the dirty streets of Paris. Even as an infant, Jean-Baptiste showed a remarkable desire to collect and distinguish scents, and as a result he lived a life of great solitude and loneliness. To make things worse, he apparently has no scent of his own.

As he gets older Jean-Baptiste is exposed to more upscale women and their alluring scent, including one that he follows through darkened streets. He accidentally startles her, and to keep her from screaming he strangles her, thus loosing a vital part of her essence. Soon after he gets a job with an eccentric perfume maker (played with mad-scientist giddiness by Dustin Hoffman), who teachers Jean-Baptiste to fine art fragrance making. But the younger man's keen ability to distinguish scents makes him the ideal pupil and he is able to concoct new types of perfume in exchange for lessons on the use of a distillery.

After leaving his tutor's care, Jean-Baptiste goes to a remote town in the French countryside that is entirely devoted to making wonderful scents and he begins perfecting his craft of capturing the essence of woman. Consequently, beautiful women throughout the French countryside begin to fear for their lives. Alan Rickman plays one of the town's leaders (and father to one of the regions most beautiful young women) and sets out to discover and capture whoever is doing this killing.

But if you think the actual arrest of Jean-Baptiste is where this story ends, think again. I don't know how it was conveyed in the actual novel, but the fine 20 to 30 minutes of Perfume the movie is filled with some of the most bizarrely sensual material I've ever seen on film. Jean-Baptiste possesses small vials of liquid representing each of his victims. Just before his capture, he mixes his master concoction using drops of each scent. The movie's final act probably shouldn't be taken literally, but at the same time, doing so opens up a wild world of possibilities. Does scent control our lives so completely? Does it drive our wants and desires? Does it fuel our passions? I'm not sure Perfume answers any of these questions, but it certainly brings them to the forefront of our minds for a few pulse-quickening moments. With Perfume, Tykver has no so much reinvented the serial killer genre but deconstructed it in a way that only a true student and lover of horror films could. He has analyzed what came before and gone out of his way not to mimic anyone else's work. Tykver has created a masterstroke of atmosphere and surreal behaviors. Although Perfume is technically a 2006 release, let it be the first great film you see in 2007. The film opens today at the Landmark Century Center Cinema. And for those of you panicking about subtitles, this French-set film from a German director is, in fact, all in English.

Capone