Series Review: "Perfume" ("Parfum") (2018).

From the director of Comeback (So viel Zeit) comes Perfume (Parfum). This German television series directed by Philipp Kadelbach, adapted by Eva Kranenburg and based on the novel of the same name by Patrick Süskind and the 2006 film Perfume: The Story of a Murderer by Tom Tykwer. Based on Süskind’s best-selling novel about smell, passion and serial killing gets a shocking contemporary spin. While in boarding school, a group of six become friends through their intense passion for scent. When one is brutally murdered years later, disturbing secrets about the group are revealed when the police investigates each as a suspect.

Süskind's 1985 literary historical fantasy novel, Perfume: The Story of a Murderer (Das Parfum: Die Geschichte eines Mörders) explores the sense of smell and its relationship with the emotional meanings that scents may have. The story follows Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, an unloved orphan in 18th-century France who is born with an exceptional sense of smell, capable of distinguishing a vast range of scents in the world around him. Grenouille becomes a perfumer but later becomes involved in murder when he encounters a young girl with an unsurpassed wondrous scent. With translations into forty-nine languages and more than twenty million copies sold worldwide to date, the novel is one of the best-selling German novels of the 20th century. The title remained in bestseller lists for about nine years and received almost unanimously positive national and international critical acclaim. It was translated into English by John E. Woods and won both the World Fantasy Award and the PEN Translation Prize in 1987. In one of his last interviews, Kurt Cobain cited this book as his favorite, noting he had read it about ten times.

The series stars Friederike Becht, Wotan Wilke Möhring, August Diehl, Ken Duken, Christian Friedel, Susanne Wuest, Karl Markovics, Roxane Duran and Thomas Thieme. Becht is excellent in the central role, which demands an ambivalence akin to that of Jake Gettys in Chinatown. What works well on the page, however, does not always necessarily work onscreen.

Whimsical, disgusting, beautiful, disturbing, and evocative, the show conjures all manner of responses. For all the emotions it might evoke, only fans of edgy, deranged TV will find this singular fantasy palatable. It's a hard show to like, but it's even harder to dismiss, simply because it's never less than absolutely fascinating. While you might not come away from a viewing feeling entirely satisfied, you will almost certainly have lots to talk about. An intoxicating fable about a man whose phenomenal sense of smell sets him on an irrevocable course, the show is a captivating, if overlong adaptation. Unpleasant yet intriguing, the show isn't exactly a breath of fresh air -- it's more like having smelling salts applied to one's TV experience. Lush visuals and lusty, rhapsodic language bring the show as close as cinematically possible to capturing an elusive sense. It's rare I find myself so fascinated at the story and anxiously awaiting every next scene, but the show kept that edge-of-the-seat grasp.

Simon says Perfume (Parfum) receives:

Also, see my review for SS-GB.