BY: JERRY P

Patrick Süskind's Perfume is the sly, lurid story of a murderer whose extraordinary sense of smell leads him to kill. Now the director of Run, Lola, Run brings the macabre tale to the screen. Warning: spoilers!

Warning: this review contains spoilers!

The German director Tom Twyker, who has done some interesting movies, made “Perfume.” He is best known for “Run, Lola, Run” but I enjoyed “Heaven” much more, and “Winter Sleepers” too. “Heaven” has one of the most interesting and surprising endings I have ever seen, and it is one of Cate Blanchett’s more eccentric but strong performances.

“Perfume” is such an odd movie, with a story that is somewhat hard to take, and it has an underlying nastiness to it as well. It is also a rich, gorgeous movie to look at, and it has two fine actors, Dustin Hoffman and Alan Rickman, doing extended cameo roles. It dazzles the eye while making you squirm in your seat. The premise of the fantasy is so bizarre and the ending so peculiar you scratch your head with disbelief when it is over.

A baby is born in a Paris fish market with a multitude of bad smells all around him. But right away the tyke knows he has a super-olfactory sense, a - if you will - super-nose, one that can smell things at a great distance and can distinguish the subtle aromas in a complex perfume. But he is a dirt poor orphan and ignorant and works like a slave for a tanner. Eventually, he hooks up with a Master Perfumer, Baldilini, played by Hoffman, becoming his apprentice, a youngster who is a genius at creating perfumes intuitively. Knowing nothing about the opposite sex one day he follows a woman because there is a divine aroma coming off her body. He accidentally kills her and then disrobes her, not as a necrophiliac might, but to smell her skin up close and personal. Thus is born another serial killer, but not exactly your run-of-the-mill variety. This twentysomething kid is a psychotic, a creature who doesn’t know right from wrong, with a dream about making a ”perfume of love” out of the bodily essence of a dozen female victims. They all die to create this tiny vial of perfume that he will loose upon the world when the moment is right.

But the father of his last victim catches up with him and he is sentenced to death by clubbing, a nasty way to die. There is a preposterous but entertaining ending, as he wafts his magic portion over a crowd of thousands of people who have come to see his execution. He walks away and goes back to the fish market where his malodorous life began. With fishmongers all around him, he pours the rest of the vial over his head and…well; I think you had better see the movie to discover how the tale ends. It is an ending to challenge the imaginative ending of “Heaven.” Twyker likes to tweak his audience with a twinge of melancholy at the closing.

For JERRY PFAFFL, writing about movies is an act of love and exaltation. Once a week while growing up he and his brother were taken to the neigborhood theater by thier parents to see second-run movies. He remembers sitting in the dark and being utterly mesmerized by noir thrillers, technicolor musicals, Westerns, and Biblical epics. When he was a college student he discovered the wonder of foreign movies and how more daring subject matter was possible. When he was teaching at UNLV he founded CINEMA X, a film society devoted to the showing of contemporary experimental films. When he was working at Bookmans on Ina he was in charge of the Video and DVD department and his nametag read "The Movie Guy." In sum, movies have always been his passion.