Katharine was a beautiful party singer. At her funeral all mourners were men. Elegant Nadja Simon, super serious Mathias Kohler, and prosecutor Grunberg could not fathom if these admirers were conquered by her amazing blonde looks, seduced by her mellifluous voice or her promiscuous personality that welcomed different men into her bedroom.
Forensic experts found biological traces of more than 200 distinct men on her bedroom carpet – and the carpet was only two years old. But these lines of introduction may mislead one to belief that Perfume, German TV series, is about a prostitute or slut.
Far from that this powerful drama is about the complexity of modern life, dark secrets of man’s primitive innate human psyche and about love and tragedy. It’s also a strange combination of Franco-German intellect – an artistic alliance between an original French writing and modern TV adaptation by ZDFneo.
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When Katharine’s corpse was discovered, floating in her swimming pool, by one of her lovers in a town in the Lower Rhine, enchantress’s red hair were shaved, her pubic, and armpit hair had been removed along with her scent producing glands setting puzzled investigators on a trail across time and space that starts to unravel the lives of five former boarding school mates of the murdered singer.
Perfume (German: Parfum) summing up is an excellent, six-episode, one season, German television series currently available on Netflix. Given its huge success its second season is already being planned. First season was released in November 2018.
The series, as hinted above, is both inspired by the novel of the same name by French writer, Patrick Süskind and the 2006 film Perfume: The Story of a Murderer by Tom Tykwer. But the novel and the original German film, of 2006, was in the context of 18th century Paris. The current Netflix series of 2018 is set in the modern Germany, in towns around Dusseldorf. Netflix had acquired worldwide airing rights outside of German-speaking Europe from ZDFneo.
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Directed by Emmy winner, Phillip Kadelback and produced by Eva Kranenberg and Oliver Berben, this is a brilliant single camera cinematography for thinking minds. This is a must-watch for intelligent mature men and women who crave for a psychological thriller close to the reality of our lives. But viewer discretion is advised; scenes can be gruesome for various reasons – not made for the conservative or the faint-hearted.