Trailer Stash: 'Perfume' and 'Surf's Up'

We'll start this week with a film I've been hotly anticipating ever since I read the book. Perfume: The Story of a Murderer, based on Patrick Süskind's novel and directed by Run Lola Run's Tom Tykwer, follows a French boy born with an extraordinary sense of smell as he becomes an apprentice to a master perfumer. And also a serial killer.

The green screen tells us that this film is rated R, for "aberrant behavior involving nudity, violence, sexuality, and disturbing images." I love aberrant behavior! A twinkly, vaguely Harry Potter-ish score brings us in on the infant Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, whose sticky filthiness recalls the vivid opening scene of the book, in which Süskind describes the malodorous pastiche that is eighteenth-century Paris. A finger nears the baby's face until, Seed of Chucky-like, the kid grabs it and sniffs. The other filthy urchins are sufficiently weirded out.

Someone sounding deliciously like John Hurt begins to narrate, introducing the older Grenouille, who still likes to sniff things. We seem him as an adult (Ben Whishaw, who's kind of ferrety-looking but maybe that's because he goes around sniffing at things), enjoying the surely pungent bouquet of Paris, and asking a master parfumier played by Dustin Hoffman to take him on as an apprentice. This is where the film adopts that delightfully European habit of making everyone have English accents, regardless of whether they're playing Frenchmen, Italians, or Czech fire-eaters. In a really cool effect that bodes well for the film's ability to convey scent visually, Hoffman takes a drag of something or other and imagines himself in a lush pastel garden.

And now Grenouille starts to get creepy. He inhales, startling a redheaded girl, who seems to understand, as if she can hear Hurt narrating, that Grenouille wants to eat her. Or at least keep her smell in his fancy nose forever, which is even creepier. We see him stirring a huge vat of oil and flowers and stalking that redheaded girl. She's picking through yellow plums when Grenouille's face coalesces out of the darkness to her left which is freaky in a way that makes the back of my neck prickle here in my nice office devoid of serial killers. As she begins to scream he grabs her and once she's dead (or maybe unconscious) he can sniff all he wants. So. Creepy.

We see Grenouille beginning the intricate process of extracting scent from the redheaded girl's body (eww...), wrapping her in oiled muslin and dunking her in that big tank full of oil (yum, deep-fried redhead). When a woman inquires what's in there, Whishaw gets a thrillingly smug look on his face as he smarms, "I'm creating a perfume." And then he kills the other woman.

Alan Rickman appears, snacking delicately on a piece of the scenery and playing the father of another pretty (and fragrant) redheaded girl. In that great voice of his ("like evil molasses," says my roommate), he hollers dramatically, "There's a murderer out there!" while Grenouille snatches another victim. Hoffman's voiceover (I miss John Hurt) informs us about the notes of a perfume and the ominous construction of a "truly original perfume" as a sweeping crane shot takes us to Grenouille in the middle of the countryside. This implies that the most troublesome part of the book to adapt to film, the sequence where Grenouille spends ten years in a cave underground eating bugs and just treasuring his remembered scents, might actually make it into the movie. You have to hand it to Tykwer, the man has stones.

Cut to Grenouille squeezing what looks like tallow out of what also looks like human hair (EWWWW) and Rickman telling his stunning daughter that "Whatever his insane scheme, it will surely be incomplete without you." How does he know that? Does he know his daughter smells delicious or is it just because she has red hair, like all the other victims? Hmm, Daddy Inappropriate.

Grenouille looks ominously out from flames as the Pretty Doomed Girl walks out on her balcony (which is really smart when there's a serial killer out there, sweetheart) and Hoffman continues narrating about Grenouille's perfect perfume. We see him, lavishly dressed and standing on a platform in the middle of a crowd, sweeping a handkerchief in the air. With a manic superiority on his face, Grenouille watches as the crowd begins to exhibit some definitely aberrant behavior. This is where, if we were watching the European trailer, a giant orgy of writhing nekkid people would begin, but Americans are afraid of nekkidness so we don't get orgies in our trailers. That makes this columnist very disappointed in America.

Manhunt! Someone drowning! Collapsing Italian townhouse! Chanel Number Five is people! Say it with me: Awesome. It's like if Hannibal Lecter had gone to Parsons School of Design.