Very occasionally, while watching this plot twist, I felt a powerful shudder from a single line. This happens when Grenouille confuses his jailer and executioner with the scent of the virgin, and walks to the guillotine in the eager eyes of the crowd. The executioner who sharpened his knife fell on his knees like a god, and shouted: He's innocent!
Most subtitle groups translated this sentence as "he is innocent", which is a plot-line translation. But I prefer that the executioner marvels at the scent he smells, the virgin scent that Grenouille made especially for him. This sentence should mean: He is innocent.
Murderers are not innocent of course, innocence is the scent of a virgin. It's a very ironic scene where the looter is showing off his loot, but people don't care about the crime he committed and can't help but admire the beauty of the loot. Sin, human relations, morality, nothing is more important than wanting to carve up a little pure desire. As a perfumer, Grenouille achieved unprecedented success. However, from a personal point of view, he was no longer the focus of attention.
The film is based on the novel of the same name by German author Patrick Suskind. The film follows the rhythm of the original book in terms of plot, with only minor changes and additions, with great respect for the story itself. It must be admitted that the novel "Perfume" is a very sharp work, and no matter how the film expresses it, it is difficult to conceal the evil of human nature that the author is trying to convey. It subverts the value of people's recognition of yearning for beauty, and sharply points out that the existence of possessiveness is the driving force that drives people to yearn for beauty. The film goes to great lengths to express this, portraying the power of possessiveness through people's reactions to aromas everywhere.
Sensory stimuli are low-level
Smell is a timely thing. As mentioned in the opening paragraph, aroma has no history of its own. Even if a familiar scent evokes something, its essence is nothing more than a familiar sensory stimuli. As long as it feels good, people will flock to it. Since Baldini was proposed by the nobleman to "create a perfume like 'Eros and Psyche'", people's possessiveness for aroma has already begun to take shape. After all, who doesn't like the good and the beautiful and want to own it? Not to mention the trivial matter of imitating a bottle of perfume.
If you smell a charming fragrance, you have to wear it, and if you taste a benefit, you can always eat it. Sensory stimuli are impulsive, intoxicating, and sometimes irrational, degenerate, and even reset. This points to the brutal fact that no matter how advanced we may be, humans and beasts are equal in the sensory world, and our attraction to beauty cannot be resisted. So, as long as you master the good and the beautiful, you can control people's hearts and make yourself popular.
Grenouille is such a gifted person, because he has a sharp enough nose, even if no one teaches him, he can recognize all kinds of smells and find good ones from the extensive smell resources. In fact, knowing whether a smell is good or bad does not need to be taught by humans. This is the innate judgment that every person with a healthy sense of smell will have, and it is different from the aesthetic training for a certain type of aroma. People have basic, and tend to agree, judgments about beauty and ugliness, such as knowing that most foods are fragrant, but fish and cheese are stinky. It's a primitive aesthetic. People are also primitive to the aesthetic of innocence, because the clean, unsullied, nascent existence provokes possessiveness and the idea of branding it as a spontaneous response, from an untrained low-level aesthetics.
Where does the virgin fragrance smell good? Let's be clear, it's not a scent that most people can smell, and we can't tell who is a virgin by smell, so it's hard to guess what's in it. But we know it doesn't smell like a mature woman, it doesn't smell like breast milk, it doesn't smell like a man (to use the original phrase in the book, it doesn't have the "smell of semen"). Therefore, its characteristics are undefiled and spotless clean, it is budding fragrance, and it is delicate and charming before the melon is ripe. It's clean and seductive, like a virgin.
Therefore, girls often do not need to use perfume. Purity is the ultimate beauty, and does not need perfume to cover up body odor or to decorate beauty. Perfume can express beauty and give an imagination. It has no intention to deceive, but it can be used to deceive by those who have this intention. In this story, the existence of virgin perfume is evil, because it is no longer a cosmetic product to cover body odor and create illusions. It exposes the deprived innocence to all eyes, and succeeds in confounding the minds of men and enticing them to sin. It can even be said that the essence of virgin fragrance and true perfume is completely opposite. The essence of the latter is to give imagery, while the core of the former is innocence and cleanliness, the return of everything to zero, the collapse of everything man-made, including morality and humanity, and a reducing agent that exposes the true heart. . Its essence is no longer good, it has become a trap, a weapon. Perfume can also be evil.
So although virgin fragrance is novel, creative, and sophisticated in fragrance, what it awakens is virginity complex, sexuality, and appreciation and admiration based on sexuality and virginity complex, these low-level animal instincts, and that does not belong to human nature.
Grenouille's Pathetic and Hateful
Grenouille was born with an evil script. The world is very cruel to him. His mother gave birth to him but did not want to raise him. The child in the nursery was afraid of him so he tried to strangle him. The person who raised him and the perfumer who taught him did not want to love him but only made money from him. No one in the whole world loves him. This is a very sad fact, and Grenouille is unfortunate.
At the same time, he is fully in line with the judgment that "poor people must be hateful". Because he needed to survive, he murdered with a knife and sent his mother to the guillotine; because it was the first time he smelled a virgin's body fragrance, he had to smell it enough, so he only smelled the girl who was holding the yellow fragrant plum, and didn't care about the other party at all. How do you react to this? After killing the other party, you can take off your clothes and smell it without any worries; because you need to make a fragrance that attracts attention, as long as you can extract the fragrance, your life is not important, and you sacrifice a few girls as a result. Experiments are even more innocuous. The crimes he committed are truly innumerable.
Judging from his intentions, it seems that Grenouille did not intend to be a villain. Crying and asking for sustenance is the instinct of life. It was an accident to suffocate the Huang Xiangli girl (in the book, it was deliberately strangled, and this is not from the perspective of the original book.) Analysis), the subsequent killings only need the fragrance of the girl, but they will not obediently let themselves extract it, so they have to avoid problems later.
So, murder was never Grenouille's purpose. But it does not mean that he has found a reason to excuse Grenouille. When Ridges asked him why he killed Laura, Grenouille's answer had only one meaning: I needed her. I just needed her. In his perception, what he needed, he would take, and no morality to restrain the self. Of course he didn't really need Laura. Actually he was saying: I need it, that scent. Whoever gets in his way will kill him.
So far, Grenouille is not inherently evil, but he is equal to evil itself. What he has is not targeted evil, but he does not know what is evil so he has no taboos. This is even more terrifying than self-deprecation, because he is standing at the end of his depravity. He has an extraordinary sense of smell and Titian ability, as well as the advantage of being incorruptible as a cover, and crime is like a god's help without a single miss. He is indeed not a mortal, but there is never a trace of kindness and light in his heart. Furthermore, he is the incarnation of a fallen angel.
Why is Grenouille like this? I can try to attribute him, perhaps because he lives on the senses but lacks education and therefore has no moral values, as can be seen from his poor expressiveness, small vocabulary and inability to understand Baldini's teachings; perhaps because he has never No one loves him, and no one treats him kindly, so he doesn't know how to love others, let alone what kindness is. He just relies on his sense of smell, and he knows how hard it is to resist the temptation of innocence.
When he found that his nose was sensitive enough, Grenouille realized it was an opportunity. As long as he can control the smell, he can confuse people. However, his greed is still different from others. He didn't want to get women's first time, he wanted to be them. To be more precise, it is to be a person with the qualities of being loved. He could not accept that he was worthless and unknown. The passage to sleep in the cave is a manifestation of this desire, and when Grenouille wakes up he realizes that he has no smell, that he smells of mud, of clothes and of the lingering soup, just not a living person. He's not a normal person, but what is he? He couldn't accept that he was nothing, like that cave without smell, unable to gain attention because he had nothing.
It can be said that the essence of Grenoye's greed is love, wanting to be loved (perhaps also wanting to love someone), a desire that is higher and closer to human nature than wanting to break things. Although he doesn't seem to have the libido of an ordinary man, he succeeds in plundering the qualities of a virgin and placing it in himself, which is closer to possessing the purity of a virgin than any man who has ever slept with a virgin. But after all desire is desire, lust is not love. Love can be cultivated and learned, but it does not come from instinct. Innocence itself is not loved by people, but people's possessive desire for innocence has never changed.
Grenouille, who thought possessiveness was love, was wrong from the start. When he found that people were mad because of their sexual desires, no one wanted to have a relationship with him, but just found someone around him. It didn't matter who he was, it was important to vent his desires; Ridges recognized him as his son, Not because he loved Grenouille, but because he smelled his dead daughter and wanted to try his best to keep the things that had her by his side, and he still only loved his own daughter. Grenouille realized that he was still worthless and unknown. He is nothing. He is not important.
In the episode where Grenouille came to his senses, the film added his memory of Huang Xiangli's girl, giving her the image of Grenouille's first love. This is a very precise comment. Wouldn't the ending be different if this girl didn't panic when she met Grenouille, but let him smell and take things, and understand that he was at a loss when he first met the beautiful? Grenouille asked himself the same way when he recalled the girl on the execution ground. It can be seen that between "pure evil" and "pure", the film chooses to express the latter, giving Grenouille a touch of human struggle, so that he is not evil beyond his face. Unfortunately, it doesn't make sense to assume that he is crying now because the answer is obvious. Since that girl, his love may have ended. His wish had been shattered, and his subsequent efforts were all in vain. He was weeping for the life that could have been changed by love.
Innocent and innocent, it is human evil
The souls who created the scent of virgins and succeeded in bewitching, did not make people love Grenouille, but made them stick to their nature. Grenouille who exploited the evil of human nature was undoubtedly a demon, but the consequences were not what he expected. He just found that virgin incense can arouse people's instincts, and he has no clue as to how evil people can do.
This is a very interesting dark line of the story. Why is it okay to use virgin body fragrance to represent innocence? And why is this innocence so unconquerable that Grenouille is always the carrier of this innocence and cannot be it? On the one hand, the film worships the cleanliness represented by the virgin, presents its seductive side, and emphasizes that animal instincts are vulnerable to it. On the other hand, once this kind of purity is separated from its source, from the girl who made it, there is no place for me, and even if it is owned by outsiders, it cannot be used by me. So there is a dilemma here, that is, if innocence cannot be controlled, it cannot be possessed, but people still will not stop yearning. Whether the former led to the latter, or the latter raised the value of the former, the film does not give a conclusion, but gives an ending: in a situation where everyone seeks innocence but cannot, misery will continue to happen.
Is it pure innocence that is endlessly harmful, or is it human beings who do evil? Both the novel and the film text are biased towards the evil of man. The novel is very frank, bluntly saying that Grenouille was born to kill his mother, that he was a demon, and that except for the slain girls who never did evil, others more or less intentionally did bad things. The film is milder. On a technical level, the film expresses tolerance with music with a strong sense of religion. A small number of close-ups, a lot of wide-angle and low-fluid lens language construct an atmosphere of patient observation and quiet staring, which softens the The fierceness and coldness of the wicked. If you want to express evil dutifully, but use the method of face-to-face description, I am afraid you will make an outright thriller. Fortunately, the film did not cover up any of Grenouille's evil actions, nor did it cover up other people's actions. It conveyed the theme very accurately: at the beginning of human beings, nature is inherently evil, similar in nature, and not far away.
This work uses the temptation of perfume to pierce the lie of restlessness, and ruthlessly criticizes the powerlessness of moral restraint. The denial of human nature is so relentless, but it is truly speechless with the sheer intent of hurting the innocent. Human nature is unbearable to be explored, peeped, and tested, and the devil is always out of sight. We can't even keep a distance, we can only wait for the devil to kill itself. But that is not the end, the one who stretched out his hand to get rid of the devil may be the same villain.
View more about Perfume: The Story of a Murderer reviews
