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Perfume is centred in New York in the fashion industry and is really 3 different stories that intertwine with each other. The movie is totally unscripted with each group of actors merely given guidelines for their substory and they were free to develop their own dialogue and direction. This was obviously a challenge to the actors with some performing admirably while others appear to go off on tangents. Thus the true intended story (if there was meant to be one) gets quite lost at times and appears to be going no where. The one exception is the story line centred around Paul Sorvino who plays a powerful gay business man who learns he is dying of cancer. He develops his character very well and the viewer can follow his thoughts and feelings and realise that while he is extremely powerful he is still vulnerable to mortal afflictions. Another story is based around two fashion designers, one of whom is out looking for greener pastures at the expense of her partner. The other story is centered around the editor of a fashion magazine who meets her teenage daughter, whom she hasn’t seen for 12 years. Each story theme has great potential but it is not realised in terms of a "story".

As a study of the fashion industry this movie quite possibly succeeds if one was supposed to come away with the feeling that these people are quite superficial, as demonstrated by the case of the fashion editor who is not comfortable dealing with a genuine person (her daughter) when she meets her.

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VIDEO
The overall colours are very dark which was obviously the intention of the film maker rather that any problem with this Anamorphic Widescreen transfer. However many scenes have lots of shadows across the faces making facial expression and features difficult to see at times, which considering this was solely a conversational experience I found quite off putting. Apart from this the images are generally sharp and the transfer appears to be pretty genuine.

AUDIO
Both Dolby Digital 5.1 and 2.0 soundtracks are included. Since this was really an ad hoc movie the sounds were also part of the experience. For example there are a lot of background noises in every scene, such as background talking – so you often get several crossed conversations and street noise or other office noise. While this may lead to the intended atmosphere it does mean that some conversations were difficult to hear, especially as some of the actors tended to mumble. While this again is no fault of the audio track it is annoying at times, as was the occasional audio synch problems, They did not appear throughout the movie but enough to be a little frustrating. The initial dialogue scenes were also partly obscured by background music, but thereafter this was not an issue.

EXTRAS
Only a theatrical trailer was included and there was no subtitles at all. English subtitles would have been very useful in some of the above mentioned scenes!

I must say this movie did not appeal to me as an ensemble piece as it just did not seem to go anywhere and ended up being just frustrating trying to work out what was going on. However it does have some redeeming qualities and being an atypical Hollywood movie there will be some people who quite like this style of movie.