Its movie review time again kiddies and do I have a gem for you today.  I actually saw this movie a few years ago and immediately bought the DVD.  I immediately had to add it to my collection which as of a few weeks ago grown to 843.  I have been trying to convince my wife to watch it with me because I wanted to share my experience with her and show her a truly original and (in my eyes) groundbreaking film.  Sadly, the movie is just a bit long for her (around 2 hours long) to dedicate to watching and she has still not seen the movie.  Last night after catching up on The Ultimate Fighter: Team UK vs Team USA, I had to re-watch the movie and write this review.

Usually I pay attention to what other critics say about movies…yet it never influences my judgment of a film before I actually see and form my own opinion.   Honestly, I like a lot of movie that critics trash so…whatever.  This time, I have no idea what the critics have had to say or whether they like it or not, honestly I don’t give a shit. 

The movie is set in 18^th Century France and is about a man named Jean-Baptiste Grenouille who was born into horrible circumstances, lived a terrible and depressing childhood yet was blessed with the gift of superhuman sense of smell.  The film shows us his life growing up in an orphanage and his first job as a tanner.  FYI, A Tanner is a nasty and disgusting job of creating / treating leather. 

Anyway, Grenouille has this amazing sense of smell and becomes attracted to the scent of a woman he sees selling plumbs in the street.  He becomes obsessed with the girl and stalks her until finally accidentally killing her.  Pretty much unfazed by her death, he spends the remainder of his time smelling her body until the scent eventually fades.  He becomes haunted by the scent and obsessed with trying to find it again.

Later on Grenouille delivers some leather to a perfumer in Paris named Giuseppe Baldini (Dustin Hoffman).  Giuseppe, thrilled by the scents of the perfume pleads with Baldini to mentor him and teach him everything there is to know about making Perfume.   After Grenouille proves himself and exhibits his uncanny ability to smell the slightest of ingredients, Baldini agrees to make Grenouille his apprentice.

One day Baldini tells Grenouille the story of a perfume that was found in an Egyptian tomb that is considered to be the perfect scent.  From that point on Grenouille makes it is life ambition to duplicate that scent. 

Now, I would have to say that the movie up until this point sounds pretty f**king boring, but I assure you it is not.  The detail, set, costumes and acting are so powerful and wonderful, you are entrenched in the plot and Grenouille’s life the whole time.  At this point in the movie, things start to speed up and the killing begins…muhhahahaha.

Grenouille is so fascinated by the scents of beautiful women, usually virgins; he becomes tormented trying to figure out how to capture their natural scent.  He needs to find a way to take their scent and bottle it and devises a way…but he must kill the girls first. 

In Baldini’s teachings, he informed Grenouille that each perfume is a harmony of twelve individual scents with many having a thirteenth theoretical scent.  This means Grenouille needs 13 girls with a distinct scent that only he can detect to make the “perfect scent.” 

Throughout the movie Grenouille kills and distills the murdered girl’s scents to prepare his masterpiece perfume.  I want to stop here because the end was so crazy and unexpected…I wouldn’t be able to sleep tonight if I ruin it for anyone.  I truly LOVE this movie and think it is completely original, unexpected and shocking.  The very end is such a “what the f**k” moment you will remember it forever.

Hint: When the perfect scent is revealed by Grenouille people lose their shit and something I never expected happens.  I mean, really when what happens happens…I was like…”Are you serious?” F**king awesome!!!

So as a sort of recap, I would say this movie is not the bloodiest, not the scariest and not the creepiest.  I don’t know if I would even really call it a Horror movie…but it is fantastic, beautiful, psychologically thrilling, fun to watch and overall a spectacle.  I hope everyone likes this movie as much as I do and hopefully we can see more original and entertaining films like this in the future.