Can you smell that?
With German series Perfume, there’s murder in the air.
I’VE been really enjoying Netflix recently, because it keeps offering interesting viewing choices.
I particularly enjoyed watching Perfume ,a six-episode German TV series directed by Philipp Kadelbach. Six episodes was easy enough for me to dig in without much deliberation; usually I have to weigh how much time and effort it is going to take before launching into a series, mostly because if it is not captivating enough, I am likely to lose interest and abandon ship halfway through.
However, Perfume was heady from the get go, and I enjoyed consuming it quickly; I finished all six episodes in two sittings.
The series was fresh off the Netflix shelves (released only in December 2018) so I hadn’t read any reviews and didn’t have any expectations.
The series is inspired by the novel of the same name by Patrick Suskind. In 2006, there was a movie by Tom Tykwer which shared the title of the book, Perfume: The Story Of A Murderer.
The TV series, unlike the period novel, is set in modern-day Germany, and features some breathtaking cinematography. Both the imagery and script (in German) are very evocative, sensual and intoxicating. Each introduction is almost poetic in its descriptions of what’s to come.
Perfume starts off with a murder, and the timeline jumps backwards and forwards as the story about six friends from boarding school is extracted, drip by drip.
The victim is one of the band of six – alluring Katharina “Ka” Laufer, the most vivacious and most sexual of the lot.
In the background, a subplot between the detectives working the case also brews slowly, and you get a whiff that all of this may be entwined somehow.
Ka is brutally murdered, with scent glands from her armpits and nether regions excised from her body.
Detectives, including protagonist Nadja Simon investigate, and in the course of piecing together the puzzle, reunite her former schoolmates, who all have hidden stories.
The ensemble cast includes August Diehl, Ken Duken, Friederike Becht, Susanne Wuest, Marc Hosemann, Natalia Belitski, Trystan Putter, and Wotan Wilke Mohring, all who give excellent performances that elevate this otherwise procedural drama to compelling viewing.
As the story unfolds, the viewer is led through a maze that is part coming-of-age story, part serial killer mystery, part love and betrayal drama, part control and manipulation case study.
The 1985 fantasy novel by German writer Suskind is also central to the series.
Not only does the series, like the novel, explore the sense of smell and its relationship with the emotional meaning that scents have, it also unveils the different perceptions and philosophies that the fives schoolmates have through their interpretations of the book and its protagonist Jean-Baptiste Grenouille.
The novel turns out to be an interesting vehicle to explore these characters – who end up becoming suspects because they, inspired by the novel, had experimented with human scents in their desire for love and acceptance.
Netflix has a pretty good menu of foreign language films – I really enjoyed Money
Heist (Spanish) and Dark (German), and though at first I thought the language would impede my viewing, it has ended up raising the bar for me.
They do seem a little less formulaic than the American fare I am more familiar with.
The one small gripe I have now is that I have to wait a whole year for Season Two to come out!
If you enjoy a good mystery as well as drama, and relish titillating your senses, you should give Perfume a shot. Note there is a fair amount of nudity and sex thrown into the mix here, so viewer discretion is advised.
Perfume is available on Netflix.