By Kathryn Lebo

For the Post

Tom Tykwer has based a successful body of work on charismatic anti-heroes, and Perfume's Jean-Baptiste Grenouille is the most arresting yet. More unswerving than Lola (of Run Lola Run), more brooding than Bodo (of The Princess and the Warrior) and far more thorough than Philippa (of Heaven), Grenouille's singular talent for smelling and his murderous obsession with perfume give Tykwer the chance to bring yet another noble outlaw to the big screen. And, this time, after a decade of filming ultramodern scripts, Tykwer gives us not only a period piece but a fairy tale — a fairy tale about a monster.

The story of Grenouille begins and ends in the muck and blood of a Parisian fish market, and between his peasant birth and godly death is a most unusual tale about a boy with a superhuman sense of smell. This olfactory savant transcends his squalid childhood by apprenticing himself to a perfumer, becoming fixated on capturing the scent of young womanhood and placidly murdering the fair young virgins of the town in order to create the ultimate perfume. Grenouille's amorality is countered only by his innocence: His ultimate desire is to make art that will make people take notice and love him. Murder is only a messy means to this end, nothing more.

Tykwer surmounts the immediate difficulty of translating a book about smells to the screen by putting our eyes to work for our noses. Vivid textures and colors evoke touch and taste in a dizzying montage of synesthetic images, and scents themselves are presented as fairy tales, evoking whole worlds invisible to all but the smeller's keen imagination. In the visual field, Tykwer's talents are in full bloom.

His next challenge was to make the viewer sympathize with a serial killer, and he's aided in no small part by Ben Whishaw's cavernous-eyed good looks. Another smart decision was omitting scenes of actual violence and focusing instead on the vulnerable naked bodies of the dead girls (though this choice is questionable as well). As the camera evokes the delicate skin textures and scents of the doomed girls and travels unflinchingly over the contours of their fresh corpses, it transforms them from people into mere materials for Grenouille's sick art project. When the townspeople find the abandoned bodies in beatific positions, we're meant to sense Grenouille's tenderness toward his victims. But it's hard to shake the fact that these women are nothing but pretty discarded objects.