MovieChat Forums > Perfume: The Story of a Murderer (2007) Discussion > the reason for him to create the ultimat...

the reason for him to create the ultimate perfume



was he so intrigued by the Plum Girl's scent, that he set out to re-create her smell?

near the end of the movie when everyone was joyous and in the orgy, all he thought about was the plum girl... kissing the plum girl, and he even shed a tear.


was that the reason why he set out to preserve scents and created his own ultimate perfume? because of the plum girl?

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He wanted to make the perfect perfume for himself because he found that he had no scent. He talks about Dustin Hoffman's character saying that scent is the soul of a thing so he felt like he had no soul or identity since he had no smell. His fixation on the fruit girl was because her scent was what opened him up to the nuances of human scent - the complexity of scent as soul.
I think he cries at the orgy scene because even though he's created the perfect scent, he knows it isn't really his scent. The crowd grasps after the handkerchief and turns their backs on him while doing so. He realizes he won't ever have the allure or soul of the plum girl.

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well, no because he wanted to get the girl's scent before he found out he had no smell of his own.

he wanted to be able to capture a person's scent from the first girl, but he only found out he had no scent in the cave,

so he wanted to make the perfume before he found out he had no smell.

One ring to bring them all, and in the darkness bind them.

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The way I understand the scenes with the plum girl is that when he first meets her he is attracted to her scent and likes her. But he has poor social skills and doesn't know how to properly introduce himself to meet her, and scares her instead, which causes her to run away. Therefore he keeps following her and accidentally kills her when she starts to scream for help. The later scene which shows her reacting differently, embracing him instead of running away, is all in his mind and he is realizing that this is what he actually wanted the whole time, just to be close to her and her scent, to experience an attractive girl the normal way (i.e. making love), not kill her, which started the whole crazy obsession with making perfume from dead girls scents in the first place.

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"I'm not bad. I'm just drawn that way"
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Ben once said he might have wanted to be a woman. That could be one of the possibilities.

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The plum girl is his first 'love', and he spends much of the film trying to recapture the experience of falling in love. Artists often try to recreate experiences that have profoundly impacted them, which is his goal in creating the ultimate perfume. As Hannibal Lecter teaches Clarice, the killing in pursuit of what he seeks is incidental.

What he realises when he sees everyone embraced in a mass orgy is that, while he can feel love, he is unloveable, and is doomed to the narcissistic pursuit of trying to artificially recreate experiences, rather than actually forge a real relationship with another human being. This disturbing realisation takes him on a pilgrimage to the place he was born - the fishmarket, where he was unloved from his first moments in the world, from whence he will now depart.

I think the film is about the effects of a cruel world on a sensitive artist, how negative experiences in the formative years can permanently damage someone, as is often the case with serial killers.

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