He has the finest nose in the world. Can he sense what he is so painfully missing?
Listen to the tale of the rococo psychopath who gave the term "mass murder" a new, cosmetic dimension. The monster Jean-Baptiste Grenouille was born in the stinking 18th century Paris fish market and from a young age the world did not treat him kindly. The orphaned and lame dwarf became a tanner's apprentice, whom the master soaped head over heels, but he did not beat the divine gift - to unmistakably recognize all the smells and odours of the world - out of the boy. And because Jean-Baptiste is obsessed with the desire to develop his talents into uncharted realms, he sneaks into the workshop of the bankrupt perfumer Baldini, smells the secrets of the craft and applies them in a form that makes his contemporaries' hair stand on end.
Symbolically, Patrick Süskind's horror film about the peculiar nature of love for one's fellow man shatters the Enlightenment belief that man is basically good. It is not clothes, but smell that makes a man - but how does one smell who is a stranger to everything human?
The novel was adapted into a film by Tom Tykwer, starring Ben Whishaw, Dustin Hoffman and Alan Rickman.