PARIS -- Long regarded as unfilmable, Patrick Suskind's 1985 novel "Perfume" has finally reached the screen in a blockbuster production that succeeds reasonably well in achieving what many said was beyond the scope of cinema: conveying the world of scent and smell.

Tom Tykwer's "Perfume: The Story of a Murderer" is the visually lush, fast-moving story of Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, a man whose hyper-powerful sense of smell leads him to become a serial killer.

Reportedly budgeted at more than $60 million, "Perfume" has proved a runaway hit in Tykwer's native Germany, where it opened Sept. 14, but being highly culture-specific it may receive a mixed reception in other countries. In France, where people know a thing or two about fragrances, audiences so far have been distinctly sniffy.

Grenouille, played by newcomer Ben Whishaw, is born in a fish market in Paris in 1738. He survives his mother's attempted infanticide (for which she is promptly executed), a smothering by other inmates at his orphanage and a childhood spent as a manual laborer at a tannery where life is nasty, brutal and usually short.

His sole pleasure is exploring Paris, principally with his nose, which is unmatched in its capacity to detect nuances of odor of all kinds. Chance brings him to the home of Baldini (Dustin Hoffman), a veteran perfumer who realizes the young man's olfactory prowess and takes him under his wing, training him in the arts of making oils, essences and other fragrances.

Grenouille gives a hint of what is to follow by attempting to distill a cat. He has earlier inadvertently killed a young woman, stifling her to keep her quiet, and discovered the heady delights of female body odors.

Grenouille decamps to the Provence town of Grasse, the perfume capital of the world, and has a mystic experience along the way in which he realizes that he lacks a body odor of his own. The movie now shifts into thriller mode. He embarks on creating the ultimate perfume, a collection of scents distilled from women whom he must, of course, track down and kill.

The keynote in the aromatic symphony he is composing is to be provided by Laura (Rachel Hurd-Wood), the beautiful daughter of eminent townsman Antoine Richis (Alan Rickman). Richis removes Laura to what he supposes is a safe location -- a monastery on an island in the Mediterranean -- but Grenouille pursues them there. On his return to the mainland, he is captured by gendarmes.

The movie's ending may or may not satisfy those who willingly suspended disbelief while reading the story on the page, but onscreen the denouement and epilogue are produced like a rabbit out of a hat and will be received, according to taste, either as a powerful mystic vision or as embarrassing tosh.

Tykwer is, however, merely following the novel's story line. His adaptation, scripted with Andrew Birkin and producer Bernd Eichinger, is arguably too faithful to the original, as well as being occasionally over-literal and laborious. At nearly 21⁄2 hours, it is certainly too long.

But Tykwer has a sure sense of spectacle, and despite its faults the movie maintains its queasy grip. The director makes minimal use of computer effects, preferring to use extras (more than 5,000 in all) in the many crowd scenes.

Rather than trickery, he relies on the power of images to evoke smells, whether rotting fish and oysters or roses and fields of lavender. The production design by Uli Hanisch (at Munich's Bavaria Studios and in Provence) brings 18th century France vividly to life. The narration, voiced by John Hurt, was presumably seen as necessary for exposition in the early scenes but is maintained superfluously to the end. The mainly English cast serves the film well, and Hoffman's neat turn as the fading star in the perfumers' firmament provides some lighter moments.