It is not at all a hot take to suggest that Demme’s Silence of the Lambs has a lot going on. I was particularly struck by the fact that upon their first meeting, Hannibal Lecter *smells* Clarice Starling.
He can smell her skin cream and he names the perfume she sometimes wears, l’Air du Temps by Nina Ricci (this fact is even mentioned on the perfume’s Wikipedia page.) This is the kind of observation and gesture that floats somewhere between the attentive, detailed compliment and the too close. I always think complimenting someone on their perfume is very chic, but here it establishes Hannibal as sophisticated and too perceptive.
Scent notes for L’air du temps claim it as the first ‘spicy floral’ perfume, with notes of neroli, carnation and peach—traditional and suitable scents for a young woman. Neroli especially, derived from orange blossom is a flower often associated w/ brides and debutantes. While it was once a refined and groundbreaking fragrance, L’Air du Temps is now a widely available and relatively inexpensive perfume. This too is significant to Clarice’s characterisation, and how her humble beginnings are set up against Hannibal’s armour of refinement.
Clarice, played here by Jodie Foster, looks like an innocent with her pale eyes and dewy skin, her pearl earrings worn even doing the obstacle course. But, she is more than this—the spicy heart of the perfume is rosemary and clove, tough and pungent herbs that may also be eaten.
Jodie Foster as Clarice Starling in Silence of the Lambs (1991)
This combination of delicacy and toughness perfectly captures Clarice, and these contrasts are carried through into subsequent performances, particularly Julianne Moore’s turn as Clarice in Ridley Scott’s Hannibal (which I’ll write about in a subsequent post).
Hannibal Lecter is a sensualist, and he’s played that way by Anthony Hopkins in Silence of the Lambs and Ridely Scott’s Hannibal (2001), and later by Mads Mikkelsen in the Hannibal series. Lecter’s sensualism is a kind of sublimation of his sadism, an aspect of it, refined into discomfort (but on the other end of the scale from his jizz-flinging hallmate in the Demme film, whose crudeness seems to offend Hannibal’s sensibilities).
*Some of this post is adapted from earlier tweets, which included exchanges with The Wyrd Word Witch Reviews