The title and much else about writer-director Nicolas Pariser’s third feature, The Green Perfume (Le Parfum Vert) is a throwback to the kind of light-footed, location-hopping capers that Hollywood used to churn out on a more regular basis, from Hitchcock’s North by Northwest and To Catch a Thief to Stanley Donen’s Charade.
In fact, Central by Central-East would be a good alternative name for this amusing, never too serious EU-set thriller, which follows a couple of neurotic Frenchies caught in a conspiracy that takes them from Paris to Strasbourg to faraway Budapest. The pairing of Vincent Lacoste and Sandrine Kiberlain, two of French cinema’s finest comic talents, is the best thing about a film whose humor could play well with local audiences.
Pariser, a former movie critic and assistant to the late Pierre Rissient, cut his teeth on a pair of well-received features, Le Grand jeu (2015) and Alice and the Mayor (2019), the latter which played in the Cannes’ Directors’ Fortnight as well. Both films were about the risks of getting too close to circles of power, whether of the sinister or benevolent kind. Here, the director tackles that subject in a caper where two naïve artists are thrown into a MacGuffin-filled plot about a secret organization, called “The Green Perfume,” that uses fake news, social media and malevolent software to destroy the fabric of European democracy and install a continent-wide fascist regime.
It’s much less dramatic than it sounds. The plot kicks off with an assassination at the mythic Comédie-Française, where Martin (Lacoste), a droopy, distinguished member of the troupe, holds a dying actor (Pascal Rénéric) in his arms as the man whispers his last words. If The Man Who Knew Too Much comes to mind, well, that seems to be yet another reference Pariser inserts into a movie that tries to capture the tone of Hitchcock and other experts of the genre, though mostly feels like a throwaway genre exercise where the director is riffing on his favorite themes while landing a few decent jokes.
Kidnapped shortly after the murder, in a scene that’s 100% Hitchcock as well, Martin comes face to face with Hartz (Rüdiger Vogler), who we learn is the head of a vast underground society specializing in the “digital manipulation of information” to overthrow the Union. The fact that a major early clue involves a comic book art collection, including works by Hergé, the creator of Tintin, is still another shout-out in a story filled with nods to the kind of caper classics this movie fails to live up to.
On the run from the cops after being accused of the killing, Martin crosses paths with Claire, a sly and self-deprecating graphic novelist whose latest personal oeuvre, entitled This is Where the Worries Start, has sold all of six copies. The two quickly team up to prove Martin’s innocence, on a mission that brings them to a major set-piece at the EU headquarters in Strasbourg, and then all the way over to Budapest, where the big showdown happens during a production of Pierre Corneille’s L’Illusion comique.
That sequence, in which the characters are forced to follow the play word-for-word in the hopes of deciphering the culprit, was also lifted from The Man Who Knew Too Much, and by that point you kind of wish Pariser came up with some ideas of his own instead of constantly borrowing from the Master of Suspense. What’s perhaps most original about The Green Perfume is how the director applies the Hitchcock playbook to the far less glamorous world of EU politics, which to many has always been a nebulous affair. “Europe, does it really exist?” Martin asks at one point, underlining how much the continent can seem like a cluster of countries with shifting borders, diverse languages where English is a passe-partout and no clear-cut general plan.
It’s a fun idea but it doesn’t exactly fuel this rather trite potboiler, which is carried entirely by Lacoste and Kiberlain, who never really make sparks fly romantically — cue the North by Northwest-style love scene on the train — but whom offer up some genuine laughs as two French Jews filled with enough neuroses for a whole new season of In Treatment. That they wind up getting drugged, chased and wounded, yet still manage to solve the big mystery, demands a serious suspension of disbelief. But then again, The Green Perfume wants nothing more than to be a reminder of the good old caper flick days, when seeing these kinds of movies also meant believing them — no matter how much they stretched credulity and shrugged off reality.
Director, screenplay: Nicolas Pariser
Cast: Vincent Lacoste, Sandrine Kiberlain, Rüdiger Vogler, Léonie Simaga, Arieh Worthlater, Jenna Thiam
Producer: Emmanuel Agneray
Cinematography: Sébastien Buchman
Production design: Florian Sanson
Editing: Christel Dewynter
Music: Benjamin Esdraffo
Production company: Bizibi (France)
World sales: Orange Studio
Venue: Cannes (Directors’ Fortnight, closing night film)
In French
101 minutes
