Thus the camera lingers on rotting fish, on animal skins at the tannery where Grenouille serves an early apprenticeship, and then on the lissome ladies who become his victims. Exploiting the lush, lurid tones of Frank Griebe’s cinematography, he rubs our noses in Grenouille’s world by assaulting our eyes with what he smells. Tykwer’s method is one of stupefying literalism. Süskind portrayed this condition in ripe, sarcastic prose, Mr.

Every stone and blade of grass, every young woman’s cheekbone and belly button, every piece of fruit and hunk of rotting fish sends its essence straight to Grenouille’s nostrils, sometimes from a great distance. It tells the story of Jean-Baptiste Grenouille (Ben Whishaw), a skinny, sallow young fellow who grows up in the pungent atmosphere of 18th-century France burdened with a preternaturally sensitive nose. Waters ever has, which has the unfortunate, predictable effect of making his new movie all the more ridiculous. Tom Tykwer, the director of “Perfume” (and also, most memorably, of “Run Lola Run”) asks to be taken much more seriously than Mr. The touchstone might be John Waters’s divinely vulgar “Polyester,” filmed in “Odorama” and originally released in 1981 with a scratch-and-sniff strip that was handed out to theater patrons to provide a smell track. Touch and taste are the favorites - hence the ubiquity of scenes that take place in bed or at a table - but an intrepid researcher could probably identify, amid the sighing caresses and laden forkfuls, an authentically olfactory film tradition.

Quite a few movies, not content to stimulate the eyes and ears, try to conquer the other senses as well. Adapted from Patrick Süskind’s clammy, high-toned international best seller, “Perfume: The Story of a Murderer” is of interest mainly as an example of what might be called the sensory imperialism of cinema.

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