The book impressed me by the choices made.
Writers are confronted with special challenges, how to balance a connection with reality with adventurous imagination reality in the sense of visceral experience and emotional relevance; imagination in terms of insight, novelty, even growth. Its got to be one of the most daunting challenges in life because there are few excuses for limiting scope and ambition as you have in most other arts.
Susskind's solution worked. So while I wandered through the book, being engaged and teased, I also was able to look at it as the hero looks at the world, dissecting its components and understanding its miraculous composition. It is in a growing trend of stories that are cast in a deviant, savant or psychic consciousness. Ten years or so earlier we had "Smilla's Sense of Snow," which cast the world (Iceland) first in terms of the character of the snow and ice in it, and everything against that metaphoric ontology. This follows in that path, more pure and direct in smell, and yet less abstract because we all do have this sense.
When you do this, you have to have a crescendo of the effect. So for the books where character is insane in some way, the insanity needs to increase, but in unexpected ways. Each ratchet has to engage, each pearl in the string being novel enough from the last that we have to leave. What Perfume does is slowly ratchet towards a more magical world. As the perfume and the skills increase in our character, the world changes from deliberately brutal to accidentally motivated with apparent magic.
So the book was magical. Tom Twyker knows all about this. He channelled Kieslowski in "Heaven" which was one of the best films ever: he delicately managed much the same balance as Susskind, including the relationship to the land you get in his novel. So I was prepared for a transcendental movie experience. Oh, and redheads, something that has become a universal cinematic shorthand.
Alas, Twyker must have had too many backers with too much money at risk to allow him to make a real film. Instead we get a filmed staging of the events in the book, as if they mattered. As if they were the soul of the thing.
We do get some wonderful images: a few wonderful images with two redheads as the bookends of murders. Two of these will live long in my dreameye. The first is the exploration of the newly expired but still effluent plum-girl. The second is the focused recognition of fate in Laura, the source of ultimate innocence in the scent around which the world is spun.
In the book these girls are on the cusp of pubescence. No such notion here.
In general, the film is a grind. Tom, come back. Smell.
Ted's Evaluation -- 2 of 3: Has some interesting elements.
Writers are confronted with special challenges, how to balance a connection with reality with adventurous imagination reality in the sense of visceral experience and emotional relevance; imagination in terms of insight, novelty, even growth. Its got to be one of the most daunting challenges in life because there are few excuses for limiting scope and ambition as you have in most other arts.
Susskind's solution worked. So while I wandered through the book, being engaged and teased, I also was able to look at it as the hero looks at the world, dissecting its components and understanding its miraculous composition. It is in a growing trend of stories that are cast in a deviant, savant or psychic consciousness. Ten years or so earlier we had "Smilla's Sense of Snow," which cast the world (Iceland) first in terms of the character of the snow and ice in it, and everything against that metaphoric ontology. This follows in that path, more pure and direct in smell, and yet less abstract because we all do have this sense.
When you do this, you have to have a crescendo of the effect. So for the books where character is insane in some way, the insanity needs to increase, but in unexpected ways. Each ratchet has to engage, each pearl in the string being novel enough from the last that we have to leave. What Perfume does is slowly ratchet towards a more magical world. As the perfume and the skills increase in our character, the world changes from deliberately brutal to accidentally motivated with apparent magic.
So the book was magical. Tom Twyker knows all about this. He channelled Kieslowski in "Heaven" which was one of the best films ever: he delicately managed much the same balance as Susskind, including the relationship to the land you get in his novel. So I was prepared for a transcendental movie experience. Oh, and redheads, something that has become a universal cinematic shorthand.
Alas, Twyker must have had too many backers with too much money at risk to allow him to make a real film. Instead we get a filmed staging of the events in the book, as if they mattered. As if they were the soul of the thing.
We do get some wonderful images: a few wonderful images with two redheads as the bookends of murders. Two of these will live long in my dreameye. The first is the exploration of the newly expired but still effluent plum-girl. The second is the focused recognition of fate in Laura, the source of ultimate innocence in the scent around which the world is spun.
In the book these girls are on the cusp of pubescence. No such notion here.
In general, the film is a grind. Tom, come back. Smell.
Ted's Evaluation -- 2 of 3: Has some interesting elements.