'okay, everybody pick out someone you wanna punch.'*
rarely, you see a movie that not only makes you want the two hours of your life back, but makes you feel soiled on the inside for having watched it. one of the first for me was alfred hitchcock's frenzy. another was kathryn bigelow's strange days.
tonight i unfortunately saw one to beat them both: tom twyker's perfume.
basically, it's about a serial killer who murders women in order to capture and distill their scent. we're meant to sympathize with the murderer, i think, since he's our pov character for the whole film. the movie is graphically sexually exploitive, and seems to have been made solely for the purpose of showing lots of naked bodies of defiled and murdered young women. seriously, 'sleazy male gaze' doesn't even being to cover it...within the movie's first ten minutes, we're treated to the sight of the killer grabbing a young woman when she dares to try and deprive him of her scent, smothering her to stop her crying out, and then - when he realizes what he's done - tearing open her dress and paw and grope and fondle her dead naked body in order to gorge himself on her scent (before she goes off, presumably).
in the end, not only does the murderer get away with it, he becomes a sort of angelic messiah-figure by anointing himself with the scents he stole from the murdered women, and is so beatified that the father of his last murder victim falls to his knees and begs the murderer's forgiveness for daring to be cross with him for murdering his daughter.
on an especially disappointing note, i can't believe alan rickman was in this piece of shit. he has seriously fallen in my estimation, and that's saying a lot. the novel this movie was based on was written by patrick suskind, and i have no idea if it was as exploitative as the movie. but i don't plan to find out - or, if i can help it, to see anything else that anyone involved in making this movie has ever done.
if you want to be creeped out and feel like you've just seen two hours of a writer/director's own personal unsettling wank material? see this flick; it won't disappoint.
Q
* an mst3k quote about audience vengeance on the makers of a vile movie. in this case, for me, that would be every single person involved in making this piece of drek. *breaks out the brass knuckles*