PERFUME movie review
Review of the movie PERFUME, Story of a Murderer.
Last night I saw the movie Perfume, Story of a Murderer, on someone’s recommendation. The essential oil and distillation theme and the scenes really got me excited and I think if that’s your thing you’ll be interested too.
I had to spend the first 15 minutes but then I was very interested.
He began life as an unwanted mute orphan with an uncanny talent for smell. The smells of everything overwhelmed him. He could smell through things, like maggots inside roadkill, and smell metal and rock. He could sense things inside the ponds and what people were doing in his neighborhood.
He wanted to capture the scent of a girl whose scents haunted the one he lost. When the girl died, he lost his sense of her and became obsessed with capturing it. The story continued. He had a terrible childhood and lived when he had to die to achieve this.
He went to work for a perfume manufacturer who was striving to find the secret ingredient in his rival’s perfume. This guy came and made all the perfume, without even knowing the names of the essential oils. He wanted to work, in exchange for knowing how to capture the essence of “anything”. This talent amazed the perfumer who was despised for greed. He promised to show her how.
The boy not only made the rivals’ perfume exact, but also made it better. The perfumer sold it and it became a hit in 17th century Paris. The boy with the nose also made her the best perfumes and the greatest success among clients.
The perfumer, in return, began to teach him distillation.
His teacher also taught him how to use an old ALEMBIQUE, which is the name of an old distiller. They showed the process of 10,000 rosebuds in one ounce of oil. They went through every step of essential oil distillation. The entire history of distillation from the fields of lavender flowers to the drop that came out of the still.
The perfumer taught him the art of making a perfume. He taught her the first impression, the second and the trail was important. He also told her the story of a perfume found in an Egyptian tomb, which when opened made the whole world fall in love for a second. This is what the boy ended up doing in the end.
The boy experimented, dumped everything into this giant alembic only to find that it didn’t capture the essence of all things. Things like horseshoes, cats, metals, came out with hydrosol and oil that smelled of nothing. He felt related to.
He got sick and wanted to die, until the perfumer told him there was another way to catch the smell, but he would have to go to Grasse, a small town, to learn it. It was called the art of Enfleurage.
Enfleurage was a process where you take purified animal fat and soak your flowers in it until the flower slowly dies. He then scrapes off the fat and distills it in a glass still over a flame and captures the oil that way.
He got a job somewhere learning how to do that. This whole process was shown step by step. This is fascinating for those who like history.
In his spare time, he tried to distill a dead flower-picking girl; she killed and then placed her body in a giant glass still after her heads fell asleep. This was funny because of the way she tried to hide this from a nosy girl.
This didn’t work, your experiment failed. So he tried to kill a beautiful virgin, shave her and wrap her corpse in animal fat and bandages, then wait and scrape off the fat and distill it. He puts the oil on his hand and the girl’s dog runs towards him, licking her hand and going crazy. He succeeded. Also whoever smells this oil on it becomes a little kinder and enchanted by it.
Yes, it gets kinky and dark. He begins murdering beautiful young women to distill their body odors. He becomes obsessed with beauty and making that Egyptian perfume he heard the story about.
See what happens after you make the best perfume in the world. The city is in chaos because of all the murdered girls. However, it makes the best perfume in the world. One that brings euphoria and makes everyone think she is an angel. Even her executioner knelt down and claimed that this child is innocent. Everyone present for his execution is filled with love and they all have an orgy. Even the bishop is taken.
This movie raises interesting questions. I don’t agree with killing human beings, but you could say that killing a flower is the same, if you wanted to joke. So are you capturing the soul of a flower when you distill it? In the same way that he captured the essence of true beauty?
Also, what he’s doing may be capturing pheromones, via Enfleurage and distillation, which I believe is currently only done on animals, not beautiful human girls. It’s an interesting experiment, but does it really work? Can you really exude human scent? Can human beauty be distilled?
This movie is really dark, it’s about a serial killer, let’s face it. It is not mine. But if you like distilling essential oils, this movie is for you. Yes, you can distill the essence of anything, practically. I’ve read some crazy old distilling recipes, but nothing quite as shocking as this movie!