But what happens when you're only getting around to reading the book after you've seen the film SIX TIMES?
I suppose that doesn't happen all that often, although maybe it does. If you've discovered you love a movie this much, you've probably also discovered you want to consume everything there is related to it, be that books, graphic novels, soundtracks, action figures or lunch boxes.
And so it was with me and Patrick Suskind's Perfume: The Story of a Murderer, whose filmed version I have seen once each in 2007, 2008, 2009, 2011, 2015, 2018, and now 2020, having watched the movie Friday night after finishing the novel last weekend.
The existence of, and high quality of, the novel is something I have known about throughout my 13-year-love affair with this movie -- almost exactly 13 years, as my original viewing of Tom Tykwer's 2006 film was on December 7, 2007. (No, didn't get to rank it in the year of its original release, to my great regret.) In fact, when I tried to sell a friend on its virtues very early on, he snootily insisted it would be impossible to film that great novel and that he would not even deign to watch such an attempt.
It took until my family and I were on a little book-buying spree while out of town in July -- to help a local bookstore that we imagined to be suffering under the ravages of the pandemic -- that I finally picked up Suskind's novel to read myself.
It actually took longer to read this little slip of a book than I was expecting it would. It's a scant 260 pages, but it took me more than six weeks to finish it -- which is actually reasonably fast by my previous standards, but slow by my new 2020/pandemic standards, especially when I imagined from the first 40 pages that I might gobble it up in a week's time.
The eventual delay in completing it informs what I want to write about today, which is that the longer the story went on, the more I questioned Suskind's choices in how to tell it. Which is absurd, as the book was the original object, and the film I love so much only a filmmaker's attempt to honor its spirit. But just as you see deleted scenes from a movie and feel very glad they were not in the finished product, it's possible to see an adaptation of a book and realize just how shrewd the decisions were on what to include and what to excise. And that can't help but make the book seem like a bit of a shaggy dog, replete with passages it should not have included -- even when it is only 260 pages.
Especially when you've seen the film six times.
So today -- hoping that I can get a good structure for this -- I want to discuss the core differences between the film and the text, and why I think that in almost every instance, the film made the better choice.
If you haven't either seen the movie or read the book, consider this your SPOILER WARNING. In truth, this post is probably best suited for people who know at least one of these pretty well, though by all means, read on, even if this does not describe you.
Note: I started writing this on Saturday, and I am only just now getting around to finishing it. Part of that was feeling a bit daunted about structuring this in an effective way, as it can be difficult to parse differences between two versions of the same "text" in anything other than a list. So instead of continuing to fuss about it, I just decided to make a list.
1) The first inkling the book gave me that I might not love it was its pacing, which is very inconsistent. In this case, the complaint about pacing goes hand in hand with a complaint about perspective. I'll try to explain. The book starts out like a house on fire, racing through its opening chapters and the opening chapters of antihero Jean-Baptiste Grenouille's life. (That's Ben Whishaw in the film.) That racing I consider to be a good thing. Suskind's elegant prose has a way of weaving together the broad strokes of Grenouille's early life without getting bogged down in the details, except as they are particularly illuminating of a broader idea -- a feat duplicated by John Hurt's narration in the film. We learn what we need to learn with an economy of phrasing and a knack for linguistic cleverness, and it's an exquisite read.
That is, until we meet Giuseppe Baldini, the perfumer played in the film by Dustin Hoffman. It is here that not only does the pace screech to a halt, but it leaves Grenouille's subjectivity in order to jump inside Baldini's head for like five straight chapters. Where Suskind relies on an economy of words earlier, here he seems to luxuriate in the inner thoughts of Baldini, spending as many words on several hours of mental deliberation by Baldini as he does on the first 15 years of Grenouille's life. We get some of this in the movie -- I think the scene where he tries to ascertain the ingredients of Amor and Psyche is great -- but we are still looking at Baldini as an outsider would, as Grenouille would if he were in the room with him.
2) Because we spend so many consecutive chapters in his head in a way that really starts to feel redundant, we learn things about Baldini that it is not necessary to learn, that indeed we never learn in the film. We learn, for example, that Baldini feels he's at the end of the road as a perfumer and is thinking of selling his shop. We also learn that he was never a great perfumer, but made his fortune on two perfumes that were essentially pilfered from others without anyone knowing. I like the film's choice in this regard, which it states openly in the narration, much better. The film version of Baldini is, in fact, a genuine talent who has lost his one-time inspiration, leaving him over the hill. I like that better as a character detail for him than someone who was always a fraud. He can still be a stuffed shirt and a bit of a fool, but he also carries the tragedy we all carry as we age, where we can no longer do what we once could. In fact, the twinkle Baldini gets in his eye when he talks about his formative days in Grasse indicates a genuine love of the art, not a conman's sense of how to profit at any cost.
3) The middle portion of the book, after Grenouille leaves Baldini to head to Grasse, really made me scratch my head. In both versions he gets diverted by following his nose to a place devoid of smells, which is a cave in a mountainous area far away from all villages. As I watched the film, I noted that we do not learn how long he stays in this cave, appreciating the lack of olfactory stimulation, only that his hair and beard grow long. I think the only reference Hurt makes to the amount of time he spends there is "a while." Judging from the hair and beard growth, it seems to be a couple months.
In the book, Grenouille stays in this cave for seven years. Let that sink in a moment. We know Grenouille is an eccentric, but the book wants us to think that he is such an eccentric that he will literally hide in a cave for the better part of a decade, spending all his time perusing a mental library of the smells he has shelved away there. The book talks about how he survives by eating grubs and dead bats and the like. This goes on for seven years. Obviously, Tom Tykwer and his fellow screenwriters, Andrew Birkin and Bernd Eichinger, thought this was a ridiculous duration of time. Especially when Grenouille had had, up until recently, a burning passion to reach Grasse in order to learn what Baldini calls "the mysterious art of enfleurage," which he intends to use to capture the smell of living beings. (Make that, recently living beings.) Even someone as eccentric as Grenouille couldn't get distracted from that goal for more than a couple months.
4) When Grenouille returns to society in the book, he's so outlandish looking that he has to come up with a story to explain his appearance. He explains that he was kidnapped by bandits and imprisoned in the cave for seven years, fed by an unseen sympathetic person. He comes into contact with a marquis in the city of Montpelier, who has a theory about the impact of "fluidal energies" on human vitality, using Grenouille as his prime example of the theory. During this time Grenouille concocts a "normal human" scent for himself to wear as a perfume to convince people he is human, and not someone they should overlook due to his innate lack of scent. He becomes further disdainful toward people before finally moving along to Grasse.
None of this occurs in the film, including the entire character of the marquis. If Tykwer et al didn't think he could be distracted from Grasse for seven years, they certainly also didn't think he would make this needless diversion to Montpelier. They are right, of course.
5) The rest of the narrative more or less lines up, but I did think there was an important difference to how the end of the movie plays out that seems purely the creation of Tykwer and his collaborators. In both versions Grenouille works on a perfume that will combine the smells of multiple virginal young women, to create a scent so powerful he can make people instantly fall in love with him with just a drop of it. The movie, though, has technical details of this process that the book does not. Tykwer and company introduce the notion of the three parts of a perfume, the head, the heart and the base, which each have their own lengths of time after the perfumed is applied that they can still be perceived. Baldini explains this to Grenouille in the film but not the book. Baldini also talks about 12 individual chords that comprise the perfume, plus a 13th that rings out and dominates all the others. This becomes the basis for Grenouille setting up 13 little stoppered perfume vials that he eventually fills with the scents he extracts and distills from the women.
It's hard to believe that what seems like such a crucial part of the film's third act is entirely an invention of the film. This is not to say it is not based in scientific reality; I have no idea if it is or not. But it works dramatically, while also keeping us inside Grenouille's head for his entire spree killing the young women of Grasse, as this great montage of murder comes complete with shots of the vials being steadily filled, one by one. In the book, Suskind makes the curious decision not only not to talk very much about Grenouille's method, but to actually step away from his subjectivity entirely, as the murders are discussed almost as though a disinterested third party, a news reporter perhaps, is presenting them to us -- almost as though just as ignorant of the murderer's identity as the people of Grasse are.
6) Similarly, the film lays the groundwork for the possible power of the perfume Grenouille creates through a story from Baldini, which he calls a legend. He talks about the opening of a pharaoh's tomb, revealing a scent so ancient and so beautiful that "for one single moment, every person on earth thought they were in paradise." It's only because we are told about this at the beginning of the film that we believe the people's reaction to such a scent at the end. The book does not include this story either.
7) There is also a crucial difference between how the book perceives Grenouille and how the movie perceives him. The book considers Grenouille to be an intentional psychopath, the movie an accidental one. While this may be a concession to a film's greater need for audience sympathy for its characters, I also think it works better. In the book, Grenouille intentionally strangles the fruit seller in Paris as a means of possessing her scent. In the film, he covers her mouth after she cries out, not wanting to attract the attention of a couple young lovers descending the stairs nearby. He's such an id and so unacquainted with empathy that he does not realize he's suffocating the girl until she's already dead, and is at first horrified by what he's done. No such complex emotions exist in the book.
The film doubles back on this in a way that I also find very effective. In Grenouille's climactic moment of triumph, when he has enslaved the people of Grasse and reduced them into an orgy of carnal chaos, he can't live in that moment of victory because the sexual activity reminds him of his first sense of love or lust for the fruit seller. He becomes overwhelmed by melancholy and in that moment realizes that the entire direction of his life has been a mistake. He imagines the fruit seller welcoming his attentions and them entwined in a tender romantic interaction. We seem to know, in that moment, that he realizes that the other way to possess a scent is to love the bearer of that scent, and to earn her love in return.
8) Grenouille has a melancholy epiphany of sorts in the book as well, but nothing about the forgotten fruit seller is suggested. In fact, I can't remember if anything about Grenouille's interior life is suggested in that scene at all. The scene reaches its climax when Antoine Richis (Alan Rickman in the film) pushes through the orgy to try to attack Grenouille, ultimately succumbing to the same overwhelming feelings of love as the other characters, even though he has the greatest reason to hate Grenouille. Grenouille killed his daughter -- Laure (in the book), Laura (in the film, where she is played by Rachel Hurd-Wood) -- yet he is powerless to exact revenge. This is the same in both the film and the book, and when Richis begs for forgiveness in the film, he calls Grenouille "my son." In the book, though, Grenouille faints, only to awaken later in a bed at Richis' house. Here, Richis proposes in a more literal fashion that he would like to serve as a father to Grenouille.
There are a couple reasons this doesn't work for me. First, "my son" is all you really need -- anything else puts too fine a point on it. The bigger problem, though, is that Richis' affection for him extends beyond an indefinite period of unconsciousness by Grenouille, as well as a change of location. I much prefer the scent, even as powerful as it is, to be a temporary spell cast over those who smell it, and when they awaken from it -- as the Grasse citizens do after their orgy -- they are mystified by the power it had over them. I also prefer Grenouille maintaining his upper hand in that scene, walking out of the city of Grasse under his own power, rather than having to be nursed, however temporarily, at Richis' house.
I know this is getting quite long but I have to mention a few other smaller things:
9) In the film, we are introduced to a teenage boy and girl in Grasse, who flirt in the fields and then have an abortive sexual encounter in a barn. At first, when I was watching the film, I forgot what their plot function was. It turns out she's Grenouille's first victim, and I think it's useful to introduce her to us, however briefly, as a way of setting the stakes. We don't meet any of Grenouille's other victims in the book.
10) Perhaps needing a scene of tension that is uniquely cinematic, Tykwer et al created a set piece related to this girl that is also not in the book. Before he has mastered his technique about how to distill the smells of these girls, he puts this girl's whole body in a big tank of water that is meant to boil down the essence of things like flowers. During this experiment he is nearly discovered by another townswoman as well as the woman who employs him and her brutish assistant. The tension in the scene works, and it has no antecedent in the novel.
11) The film also has a scene of hide and seek in a hedge maze, that recalls similar scenes from both Bram Stoker's Dracula and The Shining. This is also in the interest of dramatizing the disappearance of some of Grenouille's other victims, in this case a pair of sisters in one fell swoop. It may not be strictly necessary, but it helps establish the opulence of upper class society in Grasse. Again, not in the book.
12) I'll mention one last difference between the book and the film that comes from going into another character's subjectivity, when it would be much better off staying with Grenouille. In the book, we learn more than we do in the film about Richis, Laure/Laura's father. We learn more about his industry, his wealth -- and his feelings about his daughter. In fact, we learn that he shares an inclination toward incest with Donald Trump, as the novel discusses the woozy feeling he sometimes gets in the presence of his daughter, and his actual wish that he were just another man rather than her father so he could be her lover. As with Baldini, I don't know why we need to undercut this man in this way. It seems preferable that Richis is just a proper, God-fearing man who tries to do right by his daughter by going to great lengths to protect her from a murderer -- and despite doing everything right, still loses her.
I should close by saying that my reaction to the novel was something I could have easily predicted. I have a theory that the first version of something you consume is the version you like best, which I most often apply to songs. If you hear the original first and fall in love with it, the remix doesn't stand a chance, but if it's the remix you hear first, the original won't hold a candle to it.
But so it is also with books and movies. I remember listening to the audio book of The Hunger Games back when I had about a 45-minute commute in Los Angeles traffic to and from work. This was after I had seen the film -- twice, I think. And I had the same reaction. There were parts of the book that the filmmakers left on the cutting room floor, or never filmed in the first place. And almost without exception those seemed like the right choices to me.
It'll never be possible to test this sort of thing, as it's not possible to un-read or un-see something in order to recreate an experience of consuming the other first. But I do think you can say, without too much bias, that a certain section of a book really didn't do anything for the book, like the part where Grenouille goes to Montpelier before he gets to Grasse. I'd like to think that even as I was reading that, had I been reading it first, I would have been able to look back after I finished and determined that it was not an essential passage.
Which is what Tom Tykwer and company decided as they were adapting it, which is why they are very smart men.
In the final analysis, I regret that this post will have the effect of casting aspersions of Patrick Suskind's novel. It's a wickedly entertaining novel and I very much enjoyed reading it. It's just the movie set such high expectations that I was never going to be able to enjoy it as much as I wanted to enjoy it, which is why I couldn't sustain the fast pace I started out with.
What can you say? Sometimes the movie really is better. Or, at the very least, just so damn good that it blinds you to any strengths of the source material that may have the audacity to differ from the way it was adapted for the screen.
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