CRIME IN A BOTTLE DISTURBS IN `PERFUME'.

Byline: Bob Strauss Film Critic

How the German novel ``Perfume: The Story of a Murderer'' became a 15-million-copy best seller is a great mystery.

I mean, the story of an 18th-century French wacko with an incredible nose who goes around killing women at will, then boiling their corpses to create what he believes will be the most alluring scent ever bottled? Guess there's a much bigger audience for peculiar entertainment in the world than previously suspected.

The movie version of ``Perfume'' will put that proposition to the acid test (in America anyway; it's already grossed nearly $100 million overseas). True to the grungy, demented, unlikely spirit of Patrick Suskind's book, this English-language production by ``Run Lola Run's'' Tom Tykwer is one baroque, uncompromisingly strange experience.

So much so that it's hard to take as seriously as it's probably intended to be, although there is some clearly intentional playfulness mixed with the obsessive lunacy. But for all of its eye-rolling improbability, the picture does build to an incredible -- and incredibly staged -- final meditation on the nature of genius, identity and worship in both its personal and public manifestations.

Young English actor Ben Whishaw plays the enigmatic Jean-Baptiste Grenouille. Born in the stench of the Paris fish market, raised in horrid orphanages and indentured to a hellish tannery as a young man, Grenouille has no scent of his own (i.e., selfhood), but he's blessed with nostrils so sensitive that not only can he distinguish every smell he encounters, he instinctively knows how to combine aromas in the most pleasing manner.

He also, um, has a little trouble relating to women. When he sees one he likes -- preferably a beautiful young redhead, but most hotties will do -- Grenouille pretty much just wants to sniff them.

This understandably creeps some damsels out, and once he unintentionally kills one while trying to stifle her screams, it's not too much of a leap to a mad rampage of homicidal girl-grabbings.

And this is the story's protagonist! If there's anything resembling a hero here, it's Alan Rickman's provincial merchant, Richis, who will go to any lengths to save his lovely, rebellious daughter Laura (Rachel Hurd-Wood, quite grown-up since we saw her as Wendy in the last ``Peter Pan'' movie) from the seemingly supernatural stalker.

The production, which was shot mostly in Spain, is extremely sumptuous and grotesque in about equal measure, as France during the reign of Louis XV surely was.

But a lot of ``Perfume'' may just as well be taking place on Mars, so alien are its particulars. I guess you could say that movies don't get much more exotic than this. But another way to say it is, don't go in without a high tolerance for oddity.

Bob Strauss, [phone]

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PERFUME: THE STORY OF A MURDERER - Three stars

(R: violence, nudity, sex, language, children in jeopardy)

Starring: Ben Whishaw, Dustin Hoffman, Alan Rickman, Rachel Hurd-Wood.

Director: Tom Tykwer.

Running time: 2 hr. 28 min.

Playing: ArcLight, Hollywood.

In a nutshell: Adaptation of Peter Suskind's bizarre novel, about an 18th-century French perfumer who kills women so he can distill their ``essence,'' is a pleasingly weird, dark movie itself.