The hero of has the first affection in spades -- he wants to be the best, most daring parfumeur who ever lived, even if it means rendering flesh in glass tanks designed to extract the scent from rose petals. But Jean-Baptiste has none of the affection for justice. He's never seen evidence that there is such a thing, so the word doesn't register.
He was divorced from morality by his appalling birth (shat out of his peasant mother's womb and left to die in the bacteria-infested mud of an outdoor fish market) and his grim adolescence (as a brutalized tanner, practically a slave). The film freely admits that Jean-Baptiste is a defective person, but it's enthralled by his lifeforce and demands that you respect it. That lifeforce is signified by Jean-Baptiste's heartbeat, which debuts when his infant self is voided into the street.
Soon after, that heartbeat becomes the score's rhythmic spine -- its biological click-track. More importantly, he's an artist of scent. Jean-Baptiste spends every waking moment obsessing about how to extract existing smells and alchemize new ones.
He's about chemistry and mathematics, hunting and gathering. But he's neither prideful nor humble about his obsessive, at times superhuman-seeming focus. He's just a genius doing his thing.
His boundless curiosity and stamina could no more inspire conceit in Jean-Baptiste than a knack for sniffing out blood and sensing motion could inspire self-regard in a hammerhead shark. For this reason, other people's judgments don't matter to him. Jean-Baptiste doesn't reject morality, he's just got no use for it; it's simply not a factor in his life.
The only thing that's real to Jean-Baptiste and the only thing that makes him happy are one and the same thing: the ability to cultivate and deepen his singular talent, the thing he was put on earth to do. This tendency to equate the fullfillment of destiny with the unfettered right to act on impulse is a trait shared by artists and killers. is a creation myth for both.
It is not interested in measuring its own conscience, only observing whether its characters have one or do not, then asking whether conscience brings anything tangible besides self-doubt, timidity and rage at life's unfairness -- impulses incarnated by Alan Rickman's Antoine Richis, who's desperate to solve the mysterious killings afflicting the countryside, and determined to protect his own daughter, Laura (Rached Hurd-Wood), who's killably lovely. Richis is so morally outraged that he overcomplicates his own struggle, underestimating Jean-Baptiste by overestimating him; he seems to think of him as a philosophical terrorist when in fact he's more like a wolf: a lithe carnivore driven by hunger. Like the child molester subplot in Todd Solondz's cheerfully cruel -- which at one point put viewers in the position of rooting for a young boy to eat a sandwich spiked with sleep medicine -- the drawn-out cat-and-mouse between Richis and the parfumier turns the viewer's sympathies inside-out, which is pretty much the film's agenda in a nutshell.
The film's propulsive, often decadent extravagance would seem to be at odds with its moral curiosity. But the two qualities sync up better than you might think.
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