Perfume

Perfume

Dr. Jassim Taqui

The new German Cultural Attaché Burghard Brinksmeier thumped his cultural presence in Pakistan by showing the German film, “Perfume: The Story of a Murderer.” A large number of cinemagoers attended.

Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, born with a superior olfactory sense, creates the world's finest perfume. His work, however, takes a dark turn as he searches for the ultimate scent.

The film is an exploration of how the actions of individual lives affects one another in the past, present and future, as one soul is shaped from a killer into a hero, and an act of kindness ripples across centuries to inspire a revolution.

The storyline revolves on Jean-Baptiste Grenouille who came into the world unwanted, expected to die, yet born with an unnerving sense of smell that created alienation as well as talent. Of all the smells around him, Grenouille is beckoned to the scent of a woman's soul, and spends the rest of his life attempting to smell her essence again by becoming a perfumer, and creating the essence of an innocence lost.

The theme is very powerful. It relates to a drastic change of the belief system, rather reversing it. It strongly relates to our time where the social media has completely changed morality and values as people, particularly youth, regain their freedom. Old morality has gone with the wind.

In Pakistan’s context, the perfumer targets someone. The crisis within would determine who is the one whom the perfumer would extract his bottle of perfume.