Perfumes

A divorced father, Guillaume Favre (Grégory Montel) is desperate to get shared custody of his daughter. He needs to keep his job as a chauffeur to pay for somewhere better to live, with room for his daughter. He is assigned a new client: a gifted perfumer Anne Walberg (Emmanuelle Devos) whose skills at constructing and identifying scents are matched by her egotism, poor treatment of her drivers, and lack of tact. Unlike most people, Guillaume stands up to Anne, and she requests him to be her sole driver as she lands a series of jobs requiring her skills across France, including the capturing of scents in a replication of a Paleolithic cave site in southern France, and blending new scents to mask an objectionable odour delaying the marketing of a new range of luxury handbags (where Guillaume intervenes to double her fee if she can overcome the problem in only 7 days). In a restaurant together during one of these trips, Anne identifies the five major components of the waitress's perfume (J'Adore) as she passes.[3] Guillaume is staggered with her skill, and she confides that it is because she "invented that scent". Anne lives alone craves more social contact. She attends her agent's party but leaves on bad terms with her, later firing her. She uncharacteristically spends a night in a bar and returns to her hotel drunk, but is awoken in the morning with no sense of smell. She confides in Guillaume that this has happened once before. Four years ago she had a stressful high-profile job designing three perfumes for a major company in the US, and trying to bluff her way through with no sense of smell, the third one was a failure with an unacceptable scent - this has ruined her reputation in that industry.