I have just finished watching the film Perfume, The Story of a Murderer. It’s allegory is one which bears many life lessons while the plot fails in certain respects to capture the redemption possible. The film centers around Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, a child born out of hate in the fish-markets of Paris where he is left to die under a stinking rack of dead fish by his mother. But not just any boy, Grenouille possesses a superhuman sense of smell, which can observe scents from great distances and dissect the components down to their most basic levels. Under the training of an Italian parfumier living in Paris named Baldini, Grenouille learns the techniques of distillation to obtain the scents of roses. Obsessed with what is arguably the only woman he ever loved, a magnificently beautiful girl whom he accidentally killed while covering her mouth Grenouille sets out to uncover a method of distilling the scent of a human being. As Baldini had told Grenouille, the soul of a being is their scent.
Baldini also teaches Grenouille about the concept of top, heart and base notes in perfumery and how a scent is created of 12 notes, the first in order of detection being the top, the resident or remaining being the heart and the trailing being the base. Baldini also tells of a legend where a tomb of a pharoah was uncovered and the greatest scent the world had ever known was revealed. 12 notes were deciphered but there remained a 13th which never could be.
Nearly obsessed with this idea, Grenouille travels to Grasse, what is now known as la capitale mondiale des parfum or the world capital of perfume. Upon arrival in Grasse, Grenouille catches the scent of a beautiful girl named Laura and decides that she will be his “13th scent”, the linchpin of his perfect perfume.
Grenouille finds a job in Grasse assisting with perfumes and learns the method of enfleurage. He kills a lavender picker and attempts to extract her scent using the method of hot enfleurage, which fails. After this, he tries the method of cold enfleurage on a prostitute and successfully preserves the scent of the woman.
Grenouille embarks on a killing spree, murdering beautiful young girls and capturing their scents. He dumps the women’s naked corpses around the city, creating panic. After preserving the first 12 scents, Grenouille plans his attack on Laura which he carries out.
On the day of his execution, Grenouille applies a drop of the perfume over himself. The executioner and the crowd in attendance are speechless at the beauty of the perfume; they declare Grenouille innocent before falling into a massive orgy. Walking out of Grasse unscathed, Grenouille has enough perfume to rule the world, but has discovered that it will not allow him to love or be loved like a normal person.
Disenchanted by his aimless quest and tired of his life, he returns to Paris. Back in the city, Grenouille returns to the fish market where he was born and dumps the perfume on his head. Overcome by the scent and in the belief that Grenouille is an angel, the nearby crowd devours him.
The allegory of the film centers around the idea of a child who is born without love and left to die, having the greatest power to understand what love is, yet never to feel it or express it himself. The metaphysical questions of what is love and what is it like can only be answered by Grenouille, who is separate and apart from it and can see it objectively. Although a madman, Grenouille can so distill love down to its most basic notes that he can harness its power. But as a society, or the commune of Grasse, we are confused into thinking the exact opposite of what Grenouille has proven. We want to believe that someone - like Grenouille - so capable of understanding what love is and what it is like and having such an ability to harness its raw power can only be in fact - an angel - or a creation of God directly. The truth being that one who is in and has encountered love, often has his reason so enfeebled that he is incapable of truly even describing its nature or conveying its characteristics.
Grenouille is not unlike many modern beings - manipulators of love who have never really been in it - that being able to see love’s nature so objectively, can so easily in turn harness love’s power to obtain their desired ends which usually are control and irrational self-gain. While certainly not an absolute for all, the perversion of love exemplified in Perfume makes a nice allegory to the modern urbanite and the relationships they endure.
It is in many ways not unlike how in an opposite way, yogi seek to enhance their level of consciousness to a higher one. To escape the planar level and see the world from above, looking down at the intricate components like the wheel train and complications of a watch. To understand the movement, to see how the pressure of the mainspring applies to the wheel train, restrained by the escapement which itself is tempered by the oscillator. In our world we only feel the pressure of the main spring against us propelling us ahead, to love. In order to fix our movement and ultimately be able to wind our own mainspring again, we are actually compelled to see it from above. If Grenouille had turned his crisis into an advantage by seeking to be better, he too could have loved.
Where Perfume fails in a certain respect is to capture the ability of human beings to redeem. He who has never loved is not therefore incapable of love. Love is an exchange of value where one is self-amplified by the example set by another. It is never too late for the modern day versions of Grenouille to want to be better, to learn to love themselves and ultimately to engage in the interactive and rationally competitive love with another that makes them push themselves higher.
Just some thoughts.
