It's the 1760s, and the French have formed one of those angry mobs they're so famous for. A thin, intense-looking young man
is convicted of murder and condemned to death in the town square. The rabble are thrilled. Justice! So begins "Perfume: The Story of a Murderer," a most bizarre, bemusing, and beguiling quasi-thriller from German director Tom Tykwer ("Run Lola Run") and based on Patrick Suskind's novel. The condemned man is Jean-Baptiste Grenouille (Ben Whishaw), and the film, dispassionately narrated by John Hurt, leaps back to before the angry mob to tell his story. We begin with his birth in the putrid streets of Paris, expelled from his impoverished mother's womb into the fish guts and dog piles that mark this loud, unbelievably malodorous time in history. Raised in an orphanage and apprenticed at a tannery, young Grenouille (played as a boy by Franck Lefeuvre) discovers he has a unique gift: His sense of smell is more powerful than anyone else's. He can detect the slightest hint of lilac a quarter-mile away, can tell you what you ate for breakfast yesterday, can discern which ingredient has been omitted from a cake batter. If the gift of super-smell were useful to mankind in any major way, he would be a superhero.
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