Gonzalo Cunill Movies

The city of Barcelona serves as a small but important urban microcosm in director Ramon Costafreda's earnest tale of interconnecting lives. Jan is an illustrator of children's books who lives with his seven year old daughter Nora. Nora's favorite game to play with her father is "Dead Hand Knocking." In just a short time, this pair will realize that their delicate existence is but a small portion of the elaborate web connecting them to the very fabric of this city. Their lives are connected to the lives of others through the Rayuela bookshop, a modest store presided over by a former upscale call-girl named Pili. Other people in this web include working single mother Claudio, who can frequently be overheard haggling with St. Peter, austere security guard Gasull, who lives at home with his mother and can't resist a certain fragrance, successful lawyers Earnest and Julia, who share a rather deceptive appearance, dejected public servant Dalmau, and a young couple who have vowed to remain faithful to their dying day despite only having just met. ~ Jason Buchanan, All Movie Guide

An obsessive French perfumer with a highly developed olfactory sense and an all-consuming drive to capture the essence of love eventually resorts to murder in his unrepentant quest to find the key ingredient for his recipe in director Tom Tykwer's adaptation of author Patrick Suskind's best-selling 1985 novel. Born in a fetid fish market and raised in a dilapidated orphanage, Jean-Baptiste Grenouille (Ben Whishaw) toiled his childhood away in a rank tannery run by the thuggish Grimal (Sam Douglas). Subsequently obsessed by smell, Grenouille's keen olfactory sense becomes so finely tuned that it eventually overpowers such human qualities as love and compassion. Though he has indeed discovered the unmistakable scent of a woman, Grenouille finds it impossible to connect with the fairer sex on any sort of meaningful level. Roaming the streets of Paris late one night, Grenouille catches the scent of a young girl selling plums and impulsively strangles her, later sniffing her nude corpse in a twisted attempt to preserve the distinctive scent in his memory. After persuading legendary perfumer Giuseppe Baldini (Dustin Hoffman) to take him on as an apprentice, Grenouille travels to the town of Grasse in Southern France in order to learn the art of enfleurage at a firm run by the highly respected Mme. Arnulfi (Corinna Harfouch). It is there that Grenouille becomes dangerously drawn to the vestal aroma of the young and beautiful Laura (Rachel Hurd-Wood), the daughter of widower merchant Antione Richis (Alan Rickman). Soon driven to madness by such a pure scent, the spellbound Grenouille continues to claim the lives of the numerous young girls in a tragic attempt to bottle the impossibly elusive smell of virginal womanhood. ~ Jason Buchanan, All Movie Guide