A focus on music captures the essence of 'Perfume'

How's this for a movie hero: an outcast boy, born in a stinking Paris fish market and soon orphaned to the few mercies that 18th-century France will allow. He eats greedily and survives improbably, creeping along the edges of society. There's something not right about him. Young Jean-Baptiste Grenouille (his surname means "frog") possesses a particular kind of genius at distinguishing different smells, yet has no odor about him at all.

Any resemblance to Nosferatu, Dracula, Dorian Gray, and other damned-soul, misunderstood Gothic guys is surely intentional.

Created by German author Patrick Suskind in his 1985 bestseller "Perfume: The Story of a Murderer," Grenouille fascinated Kurt Cobain, who was inspired to write the song "Senseless Apprentice" about him, as well as directors Ridley Scott and Tim Burton , who wanted to make the film version of the novel. The one who crossed the finish line first was Tom Tykwer, best known for his 1998 arthouse hit "Run Lola Run."

In the novel, the elegant, ironic prose and intoxicating historical detail about perfume-making distracted readers from Grenouille's merciless, vampire-like quest to steal the scent of the living. Tykwer, whose film opens Friday , had a challenge as difficult as engaging 15 million readers: How can the invisible, primal pleasures of scent be shown?

For Tykwer the answer was music, which he wrote with his frequent collaborators Johnny Klimek and Reinhold Heil . Just how important this orchestral score is to the director can be measured by the unhappiness he still showed after a miscue at the end of the film's preview screening the day before.

"I'm saying, 'Wait. Louder, turn it up.' And they cut off the music! I hate that. I want people to sit and listen and take in the credits. We worked five months on this main theme, 10 minutes of music and they just -- " He mimes pulling a plug and runs a hand through his spiked hair.

What kept "Perfume" from the screen was not the story's gloom or the difficulty of translating the olfactory world to the medium of film. Instead, the novel's publicity-averse author had long refused to sell the rights. Among Suskind's circle of friends is Bernd Eichinger , a powerful and prolific film producer whose credits include "The Name of the Rose." "I thought it was extraordinary, one of the best novels I'd ever read," he said, speaking by phone from Los Angeles. But he, too, was told the rights were not available.

Whatever changed Suskind's mind came in 2000. Eichinger bought the rights for an unnamed sum and wrote a 70-page script treatment. The major liberty taken was that the actor cast as Grenouille should be easy on the eyes and not the carbuncle-covered figure described in the novel.

"That's poetic license," says the producer. "You have to do that. You read the description once in the novel, you're not reminded all the time of his ugliness. But in a film, you see Grenouille every minute. You need to have some attraction to this character -- you don't do the book a favor, or the audience, if you don't want to watch and follow him."

Grenouille is played by the decidedly handsome and fine-boned British stage actor Ben Whishaw , whom the filmmakers cast after catching his Hamlet at London's Old Vic; he also played the young Keith Richards in "Stoned." He'll soon play yet another rock star, the young Bob Dylan in Todd Haynes's upcoming film, "I'm Not There."

"Many people we spoke to, directors, screenwriters, thought it wasn't possible to have a hero who was almost autistic, who spoke to no one," says Eichinger. "And they felt it was too dark. They suggested a new character, sort of policeman, who would pursue him. Too many saw the story as purely a thriller."

Only a few, including Tykwer and screenwriter Andrew Birkin , agreed that "Perfume" the film had to retain its literary essence, with a narrator's voice, a painterly but unbeautiful look. "In Europe, the novel is like 'Lord of the Rings,' " says the director. "Everyone who reads it feels that they are the first one. They feel that they're discovering it, and they feel that the novel is speaking only to them."

But they always returned to the problem of pushing perfume into the visible and audible realm. Perfumers speak of "composing" scents, which appear in heart, middle , and base notes, all of them triggers for emotions and memories. That suggested both music and color; filmmakers kept the story's early scenes in muted browns and grays, opening into brighter natural light as Grenouille becomes a kind of nose-genius -- and a killer.

"The only time we did let things run wild, visually, was with Baldini (the perfumer played by Dustin Hoffman)," says Tykwer. Through one of Grenouille's first mixtures Baldini is transported , "Back to his youth in old Naples. The smell is triggering all these pleasant emotions, a woman desiring him, whispering in his ear. Smell can unleash all these memories in us, a moment from 20 years ago. A house we lived in, a meal we ate, the house of your grandmother."

Starring as Laura , the innocent young woman at the apex of Grenouille's obsession, is Rachel Hurd-Wood , who made her film debut as Wendy in P.J. Hogan's 2003 remake of "Peter Pan." To give her beauty a "butterfly" quality, Hurd-Wood was costumed in luminous white and pale blue embroidered gowns, and her light-brown hair was dyed titian red.

"Laura is a reflection of all he desires," says Tykwer. "Grenouille's chosen an object who is deliberately out of reach, whom he cannot get. The only way to get her is to kill her."

When she arrives, the audience's sympathies begin to shift between Grenouille and anyone who will stop him: He kills a dozen young women in quick succession. What the author dealt with in two pages of dispassionate prose gets about five minutes of pitiless celluloid montage.

"It's supposed to be upsetting," Tykwer said. "Can you follow this person all the way, where he's going? You do need to know how he collects scent, and from whom he's getting it. And actually, you don't see anybody die. Most people tell me they find it quite fascinating."

The film has a scent of darkness in its subtitle and in its opening scene; no audience can say it wasn't warned.

"This is cruel, what Grenouille's doing," says the producer. "On the other hand, he's not enjoying or lingering. All he cares about is the task: the perfume. It's worse, even, that he doesn't care. The audience has to be on the edge: we don't want him to kill this beautiful girl, yet we do want him to succeed in creating this perfume. We do want to see what this final mixture will do. Sort of. It could be horrible. There's a point where you're saying, 'Don't kill her! Escape, both of you. But, get the perfume finished!' "

When Grenouille, on a fateful day, uncorks his secret potion upon the world, the results are awe-inspiring. Even then -- especially then -- the filmmakers insisted upon hiring an actual mob. Filming in the plaza of a Barcelona art museum, the filmmakers called upon 750 extras, including a 50-member dance theat er troupe.

For Whishaw, who stood alone on a dais before a crowd, that scene was reminiscent of a pop star standing in the spotlight. "What Grenouille wants there is something like what Michael Jackson -- someone who is a strange combination of terrible loneliness, eccentricity, and showman -- is trying to accomplish," says the actor speaking by phone from London.

"All his life he's been like a spirit, and then he's a public figure, a showman, receiving it all." And then the scent, powerful as it is, is lost to history, like a song that played just once.