“She’d sit very close to me, and she’d smell of tuberose, which is not my favourite perfume, not by a long shot”. Print the legend: Gloria Swanson adored Narcisse noir, the perfume created by Ernest Daltroff for Caron in 1911, by 1950 suitably old-fashioned; she overused it, she saturated her sets – and surely Sunset Boulevard’s set. Three years earlier, the same perfume had lent its title to Powell and Pressburger’s film, Black Narcissus; in both cases, stories of derailed minds, of a sensual delirium out of time or out of place. From a dislocation, from a wrong turn of fate, so begins the story of Joe Gillis, an out of work young screenwriter who, fleeing creditors, veers into a driveway on Sunset Boulevard; ends up in the villa of an elderly silent film diva, living a macabre and grotesque life amid memories of past glory; becomes her kept man and then, between pity and disgust, her lover, and the ending is known: le mort saisit le vif – when he tries to leave, she shoots him, and he dies to tell. Sunset Boulevard remains the cruellest and most mocking film about Hollywood, the best balanced in its chiaroscuro, sustained by a black humour over which Erich von Stroheim presides as master of ceremonies; but it is also a poignant story about growing old, and about the harrowed illusions we all live with. With every viewing, Gloria Swanson’s performance feels more excruciating, William Holden’s more skilled and affecting. Unforgettable is the tenderness of that nighttime dialogue, along the Paramount backlots, between two people slowly falling in love – when he, as in an olfactory counterpoint, tells her she smells of fresh air and clean laundry. (For the record: Narcisse noir contains no tuberose. It is the deadly embrace between orange blossom on the verge of collapse and rare Mysore sandalwood. On the other hand, in 1948, Fracas – an intoxicating tuberose born from Germaine Cellier’s tempestuous flair – had burst onto the perfume scene to great acclaim. How much Fracas Wilder and Brackett must have endured at Hollywood parties in those years… So I’ve always thought that was the tuberose soaking Norma Desmond’s faux coiffure, and the cone of light streaked with smoke, while an old projector revives the mute ghosts of Queen Kelly. But that, as Wilder himself would say, is another story – on which I may already have lingered too long).

Paola Cristalli