![]() He is twitchy, detached, and monosyllabic, and his gruesome experiments on the corpses of his victims appear more clinical than predatory. Ben Whishaw’s performance as Grenouille brings out the uniqueness of the character in other ways. When he catches the scent of a beautiful woman for the first time, only her neck and hair are shown, suggesting that he reads people through their smell rather than their expressions. The camera soars, speeds, and hovers over the objects Grenouille is smelling – oysters, feet dancing in a puddle, plums, and hair. A voiceover from the velvet voice of John Hurt details Grenouille’s early life, but visual cues are also employed. He tackled the challenge in several ways. Tykwer dismissed the idea that the novel was unfilmable, arguing that books can't mimic scent any better than movies can. Süskind eventually sold the rights to a producer friend who brought in Run Lola Run director Tom Tykwer to adapt it. They are as pivotal to the plot as they are to the atmosphere, and Süskind believed that only Stanley Kubrick or Miloš Foreman could translate his work to the screen. But Kubrick declined, allegedly declaring the book to be unfilmable. The book is full of lengthy descriptions of smell that immerse the reader in Grenouille’s experience. His abilities give him a knowledge of the world that is more animalistic than human, and his obsession with preserving the natural scent of beautiful women and make something of his life drives him to serial murder. Set in 18th-century France, it follows Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, an orphan from a Paris slum who possesses an unparalleled sense of smell. German author Peter Süskind resisted selling the rights to his novel Perfume: The Story of a Murderer for nearly two decades, believing that its focus on scent could not be captured on film. So whether you’re a movie buff or one of those people who almost always think the novel was better, vote up the books that got surprisingly worthy adaptations despite the odds. But no matter what the reviews or balance sheets say, it’s always a matter of opinion whether a movie succeeds at capturing the essence of its source material. Dune was also deemed impossible to adapt - previous attempts not withstanding - only to be turned into a box office and critical hit when Denis Villeneuve stepped in. But Hollywood has a long track record of filming the unfilmable - and sometimes they even get it right.īefore Peter Jackson monopolized the box office and the Oscars with his Lord of the Rings trilogy, Stanley Kubrick thought Tolkien’s novels were unfilmable. It’s difficult to imagine movies like Alfonso Cuarón’s Gravity or the classic musical Singin’ in the Rain as anything other than cinematic spectacles, just as it’s hard to visualize the work of Kurt Vonnegut or David Foster Wallace on screen. The Avengers, Gone with the Wind, The Godfather, and The Shawshank Redemption (to name a few) all have literary origins, but not all books are easily adapted to the screen, and some of them are downright “unfilmable.” Books and movies are very different art forms, and not all stories translate well. If you were to read through a list of the highest-grossing movies of all time or the best movies ever made, you’ll find that a sizable proportion of them are based on books.
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