For him the smell of freshly mown grass is a pleasure, for them a slaughter. If the stalks are cut off, she explains, insects attack the cut and suck up the grass. As a defense, the plants would release substances that in turn attract other insects, which are then supposed to kill the sucking animals. Just a slaughter. What he likes to smell, what reminds him of his childhood and the father with the lawnmower, are just enzymes, she claims.
So this film is about proteins and biochemical processes, as well as profiling problems and judicial protests. And that’s how it works: Guillaume (Grégory Montel), who is in his mid-forties, has no wife, but a daughter – according to the family court, however, an apartment that is too small to let her stay overnight. So he takes any job he can get. So he becomes the chauffeur of the fragrance consultant Anne (Emmanuelle Devos), who once composed perfumes for Dior, but after a breakdown is only allowed to compose the smells of cat litter or deodorant rollers.
As a spectator, you almost think you can smell a few smells
But she likes to share her knowledge of smells with the man who will soon be her girl for everything: “Close your eyes and breathe in slowly, as if you were smelling a flower,” she says to Guillaume in her odor laboratory. And he joins in, taps the odor of orange peel or the smell of garbage cans. As a viewer, you also think you can sniff individual components – even if the cinema is an odor-free zone, at least on the screen.
In terms of film history, smell sensations play a subordinate role, while sensory impressions in the cinema are always aimed at visual and auditory stimuli. Experiments with scent organs or aroma cards to scratch off could not prevail. The somewhat unworldly Mademoiselle Anne can at least give her audience a sense of olfactory perception – that is perhaps the greatest achievement of this French feature film from 2019.
Fortunately, screenwriter and director Grégory Magne (“L’air de rien”) doesn’t make the mistake of creating a liaison with his screen couple; he takes time for his characters and their peculiarities and tells of a friendship that would hardly exist in real life – the two are too unequal. In spite of everything, it looks very lifelike, humane and not at all as flowery as the German title suggests.
Les parfums, F 2019 – Directed and written by: Grégory Magne. Camera: Thomas Rames. With: Emmanuelle Devos, Grégory Montel, Sergi López. Happy entertainment, 100 minutes