I could look at the brilliant Friederike Becht walking across rooms and through doorways and watch emotions flicker across her face 7 days a week, and, as other reviewers have written, this is absolutely beautifully filmed and paced - as long as you don't mind a bit of 'European' slowness, which some reviewers clearly do. The loss is theirs. Some other reviewers have registered disquiet at the level of violence against women in the show. Yes, there is a lot, and it is often very graphic. But on the one hand, I see it often said that the levels of exploitation of and violence against women in western culture is a suppressed narrative which should be brought out into the open, and on the other this series does make that narrative very explicit, but not in a way that seems to me to valorize, aestheticize (unless you are a perfumier) or legitimize it - rather the opposite. So either you suppress the narrative, which is bad, or foreground it, which is also bad. The problem, here, from my perspective, is that the central characters in this show, including the police (and Nadja, I am also looking at you here) could not between them manage to identify a single point on any moral compass if their lives depended on it. To that extent maybe it mimics Suskind's novel, which by the way I hated, in part for that reason, but it also makes it hard as a viewer to attach to any character in the show - they are all wandering in a moral and emotional wilderness. I kept wondering if I was supposed to relate to Nadja as a 'wronged' character, a victim, but I'm sorry, don't shag you married superior, Nadja. It's not that hard. Maybe this is the underlying point about 'attachment disorder' - individuals have fractured attachments because they have been sent to boarding schools, or put in care, or have experienced childhood abuse, or have been prematurely exposed to adult sexuality, or have been in foster homes. So, yes, this was interesting and good to watch, but emotionally as bleak as the flat lower-Rhine landscapes over which the camera often lingers.
Review of Perfume
