beautiFiction

It's quite difficult to formulate some conclusion and understanding of this film, almost as difficult as the understanding of 'beauty' itself. It's a very well made and different film which keeps you indulged in its own flow. Even after already having a basic idea of the story, I felt it is much more than a story or even direction or cinematography or many other things, which makes it worth experiencing. May be it's the essence (perfume!) of the story, the urge to understand fundamentals of the concept called 'beauty'. We all have our own individual but basically similar ways of perceiving and reacting to beauty, very naturally. And this is where the movie tries to imply the more acceptable and human way of acknowledging beauty, by revolving around a character having almost supernatural powers, that of perceiving beauty (or lack of it) in the form (?) of smell. Yes true, that smell is part of beauty, but what if for someone beauty is only good smell? And in case of Jean Baptiste Grenouille, it seems quite possible, because he himself doesn't have any smell of his own. In the world of smells he just doesn't exist! His way of perceiving and reacting to beauty is only limited to smell! He is a person who cannot love someone or be loved... may be because he doesn't understand beauty in a natural way, like everyone else around him.
And then there are common people around him, who may not be able to analyse and formulate the essence of beauty in some tangible way, but they sure know how to acknowledge it in a more comprehensible manner. To some extent they can even identify and acknowledge it in the form of the magical perfume developed by Grenouille, the one he made using skin of beautiful women! In the scene of his day of execution he magically and literally rules the crowd using his magical perfume, but himself remains uaffected by its divine power. For you need to have some wholistic understanding of love, beauty to experience it. The word 'beautification' has some meaning only for those who have and understand beauty in its little more generic form. For other it's more of beautiFiction! So what happens when Grenouille almost empties his magical perfume bottle on himself is not very much a mystery. The perfume and the perfumer remain merely the transporters of beauty and love, and being a transporter of something implies there is a lack of that 'something' in the transporter.
I am sure all this sounds very complex and confusing, but if you think, thats how it is.... like the concept of beauty.