It was always going to take either a very brave or a very foolish director to attempt to adapt Patrick Süskind's tour-de-force novel about a man born in 18th-century France with no personal odour and a supernaturally developed sense of smell, whose apartness from the rest of mankind flips him with autistically driven self-justification from pariah to sociopath. Tom Tykwer, previously best known for the showy but undeniably electrifying Lola Rennt, is perhaps a dash of both brave and foolish. No-one was ever going to manage to bring a text centred on the interior life of an utterly dehumanised protagonist and a world consisting of overpowering scents across the functional divide between the literary and cinematic media in an intact state. Tykwer's decision - that the visual and audial attributes of the seventh art would have to be accentuated to synthesise the sensory impact of the novel's olfactory descriptions of a rancid Paris or sublime blends of fragrances - was a logical admission of the compromise required. And the casting of an unknown, Ben Whishaw, as the alien-like Grenouille, apparently with directorial orders to suppress any acting urges, may at first seem like a grave error - surely, without the novel's access into his thoughts, we must be given some way to connect with him? - but in fact works to amplify the character's uniqueness: he is both blank slate and consuming void, and therein becomes magnetic long before he actually alchemically makes himself so.
Some of the supporting casting, particularly that of Dustin Hoffman hamming away as the perfumer Baldini, and the choice of English (Cockney for all the plebs, of course) as the film's language, both introduce unwelcome false notes into the melange. But what Tykwer's regular cinematograher Frank Griebe has created is a feast of such visual delight, twinned with a potently plangent original soundtrack, that the trance induced is little broken by such jars.
8/10
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