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An obsessive French perfumer with a
highly developed olfactory sense and an all-consuming drive to capture the
essence of love eventually resorts to murder in his unrepentant quest to find
the key ingredient for his recipe. Born in a fetid fish market and raised in a
dilapidated orphanage, Jean-Baptiste Grenouille (Ben Whishaw) toiled in a rank
tannery. Subsequently obsessed by smell, Grenouille's keen olfactory sense
becomes so finely tuned that it eventually overpowers such human qualities as
love and compassion. Roaming the streets of Paris late one night, Grenouille
catches the scent of a young girl selling plums and impulsively strangles her,
later sniffing her nude corpse in a twisted attempt to preserve the distinctive
scent in his memory. After persuading legendary perfumer Giuseppe Baldini
(Dustin Hoffman) to take him on as an apprentice, Grenouille travels to the town
of Grasse in Southern France in order to learn the art of enfleurage at a firm
run by the highly respected Mme. Arnulfi (Corinna Harfouch). It is there that
Grenouille becomes dangerously drawn to the vestal aroma of the young and
beautiful Laura (Rachel Hurd-Wood), the daughter of widower merchant Antione
Richis (Alan Rickman). Soon driven to madness by such a pure scent, the
spellbound Grenouille continues to claim the lives of numerous young girls in a
tragic attempt to bottle the impossibly elusive smell of virginal womanhood.
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