Film Information
Film: NOSE Chōkōshi: Sekai de Mottomo Shinpiteki na Shigoto (NOSE: The Perfumer – The World’s Most Mysterious Profession; Japanese title; original title: NOSE – The most secret job in the world)
Release date: February 22, 2021
Directors: Clément Beauvais and Arthur de Kersauson
Featuring: François Demachy
Available to watch on Amazon Prime!!!!
Monsieur Dior loved flowers such as lily of the valley. That is why I have to preserve the scent of flowers. Chanel did not like flowers. That is why Chanel’s perfumes smell more abstract than floral.
François Demachy
Film Review
Perfume is all about emotion. It begins with emotion and encompasses things such as seduction. So desire is, of course, an underlying theme.
François Demachy (from the film)
In this documentary, Christian Dior reveals the work of the house’s in-house perfumer, focusing on what François Demachy, Dior’s first in-house perfumer, does in that role. Others also speak about Demachy: Demachy’s colleague Jacques Cavallier, Louis Vuitton’s in-house perfumer; rose growers; Erin Flaherty, a former director at Harper’s Bazaar and Marie Claire; Eddie Bulliqi, who also writes for Fragrantica; and Robertet (in Japanese).
François and I are bound by something very special. We make the best perfumes for our companies. We share a passion and a knowledge of raw materials, and because we both come from Grasse, we also share an olfactory education.
Jacques Cavallier (from the film)
You can enjoy the film simply by watching its images, even without reading the subtitles, so no knowledge of perfume is necessary. At the same time, it is a mouthwatering film for perfume enthusiasts, with footage of three types of ambergris (whose color changes according to how long it has drifted at sea) and moments of hand-picking flowers.
What is disappointing, though, is the number of typographical errors and omissions, as well as instances where the Japanese subtitles do not use the translations generally accepted in Japan. For example, Robertet is normally rendered in Japanese as Roberute, but here it is rendered as Robātetto. Why would a house of this stature release a paid documentary around the world without checking the script or hiring a translator familiar with perfume? It is all very well to show how particular the house of Dior is about its raw materials, but one could be forgiven for wondering whether, in the end, the aim was to increase revenue at low cost (although I do not think that was actually the case). Given that the film took two years to make, I find the roughness of parts of the translation extremely disappointing and a wasted opportunity.
No one foresaw that, half a year after this film was announced, François Demachy would step down as in-house perfumer and the much-celebrated Francis Kurkdjian (in Japanese) would become the house’s second in-house perfumer.
