Perfume: The Story of a Murderer (2006) on Netflix
In 18th-century Paris, Jean-Baptiste Grenouille has an extraordinary sense of smell. A delivery takes him to the perfume shop of Giuseppe Baldini, who is amazed by the fragrances he creates.
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Trailer
Plot summary
Jean-Baptiste Grenouille is born in the stench of an 18th-century Paris fish market, where his mother leaves him on the ground and is hanged for it. He grows up in an orphanage and becomes a tanner's apprentice, and a delivery takes him into Paris, where the new scents of the city delight him. In a perfume shop, the perfumer Giuseppe Baldini is amazed that the young man can compound fragrances though he knows neither their names nor the methods of the trade. Grenouille revives the perfumer's career with new formulas and asks to be taught how scents can be held. Learning that distillation will not capture every scent, he hears of another method used in Grasse and receives the journeyman papers that allow him to travel there.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Perfume: The Story of a Murderer (2006)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Eichinger had to take out a personal loan because the supervisory board of Constantin Film refused to approve the selling price; he is rumored to have paid €10 million for the film rights.
- The search to find an actor to play Grenouille took nearly a year; on casting agent Michelle Guish's advice, Tykwer went to see Ben Whishaw perform as Hamlet in Trevor Nunn's production and immediately felt he had found the actor for the role.
- The film is based on the 1985 novel by Patrick Süskind, which has sold over 20 million copies worldwide; Süskind reportedly thought only Stanley Kubrick and Miloš Forman could do the book justice, and refused to let anyone else adapt it to film.
- A total of 5,200 extras were used for the film, sometimes with nearly a thousand at once, and one scene alone required 750, with fifty key players from the dance theater group La Fura dels Baus forming the core of the crowd.
- Artist-director Julian Schnabel wanted to direct a film version of the novel and wrote a script, but Eichinger, who owned the rights, disliked his stream of consciousness-driven narrative; Schnabel eventually transferred that approach to his 2007 film The Diving Bell and the Butterfly.
- One of the film's executive producers, the chief executive of the closed investment fund company VIP Medienfonds, was arrested in October 2005 on suspicion of fraud and tax evasion.
