Grade: B

A very strange book by a darling of the literary elite has been turned into a very large but equally strange film by a darling of the cinematic elite in “Perfume: The Story of a Murderer,” which Tom Tykwer (“Run Lola Run”) has, with the help of co-writers Andrew Birkin and Bernd Eichinger, fashioned from the esteemed 1985 novel by Patrick Suskind. The picture, which clocks in at just under two-and-a-half hours, is an ambitious, visually stunning portrait of overwhelming obsession, but one that—true to the book, it must be said—keeps the viewer at considerable remove. That sort of detachment can very well work on the page, where authorial musings can take precedence over narrative and empathy; but on the screen it makes for a picture that audiences will find very hard to understand, let alone embrace.

That’s particularly true in this instance because the tale centers on the one sensual area cinema has the greatest difficulty conveying—the olfactory. When producers got the not-so-bright idea of pumping odors into theatres as part of their movies, first with Aromarama in 1959 (in the documentary “Behind the Great Wall”) and then with Mike Todd’s Smell-O-Vision in 1960’s “Scent of Mystery,” it proved a bust, and more recent scratch-and-sniff experiments (as with 2003’s “Rugrats Go Wild,” which used what was called Odorama) have been no more enticing. So how to convey a narrative about a nearly-mute fellow in eighteenth-century France who proves to have the most sensitive and discriminating nose in all the world? Tykwer attempts to accomplish with succulent visuals what a writer might with lavish prose, but that approach, while often gorgeous, can—even when coupled with close-ups of sniffing nostrils—only approximate what he’s aiming at. In a very real way, the essence of “Perfume” is unfilmable.

And yet despite this inevitable failing the film is almost perversely fascinating, not merely because of the director (and virtuoso cinematographer Frank Griebe’s) imaginative style, but because the plot, slight as it might be, holds the interest. It’s basically a variation on the “Frankenstein” template, but with a typically post-modernist philosophical twist, about a man obsessively trying to achieve perfection in the one human area in which he excels rather than create life itself, but also doing so from the raw material of corpses (which, in this case, he acquires through murder). The protagonist is Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, abandoned to almost-certain death by his fish-mongering mother upon birth (a crime for which she’s hanged) and deposited in an orphanage whose mercenary mistress sells him as a virtual slave worker to a brutal tanner. As he grows up, however, Grenouille’s sense of smell develops unbelievable acuity, and he eventually succeeds in becoming an apprentice to has-been perfumer Baldini (Dustin Hoffman) and resurrecting the old man’s business with his skill.

But by this time Grenouille’s obsession with recreating the perfect scent has been born as the result of his accidental encounter with a beautiful street-merchant whom he accidentally kills in his effort to possess her aroma. When Baldini’s methods of extraction and combination of ingredients prove insufficient for his purposes, Grenouille takes off to Grasse, in Provence, the fabled center of enfleurage, the technique of liquefying odors from the petals of flowers. There he tries to use the same devices to distill the scent of femininity (and, by extension, love) by using them on the bodies of young women he kills. He becomes particularly transfixed with Laura (Rachel Hurt-Wood), an angelic creature who’s the daughter of a rich merchant (Alan Rickman), who in turn will do all in his power to protect his daughter from the unknown villain prowling the Grasse streets. The last reel returns to an opening sequence of Greouille’s imminent execution, showing how his crimes are unraveled (not without some collateral damage, however) and how the result of his morbid experiments has given him unexpected power, the latter exercised in an almost Brueghelian scene that’s impressively weird but teeters on the brink of the ludicrous.

The oddity of all this isn’t likely to endear “Perfume” to a mainstream audience, but despite its peculiarity the picture creates a seductive ambience that’s strangely intoxicating. Ben Whishaw overcomes the verbal limitations of the lead role with a subdued feral quality, making Jean-Baptiste a sort of “wild child” in the wider society. Hurd-Wood provides an appearance of luminous, almost otherworldly beauty, especially as Tykwer photographs her, and Rickman conveys an appropriate mixture of concern and vigor as her father. As for Hoffman, he’s not really right for the role of Bandini, and his shtick is excessive at times, but even his excesses are fun to watch. And though narration is ordinarily the bane of movies nowadays, this is one of the rare instances in which it’s indispensable; and the aloof, ironic tone that John Hurt adopts in delivering snatches of the book’s prose is right on target. Technically the picture is impeccable, with Griebe’s elegant cinematography feasting on Uli Hanisch’s production design, Laia Colet’s art direction, Philippe Turlure’s set decoration and Pierre-Yves Gayraud’s costumes.

There’s a sense of near-folly about “Perfume,” and the cinematic fragrance it produces may strike you as more overpowering than delicate. But even though it may come across more than a little precious and pretentious, its memory will linger in your mind long after those of other films have faded.