When I read Luca Turin's pants-creaming review of this scent, I expected... well, I don't know what I expected. But I should have expected what it was: a big 80s oriental, a genre both Turin and Sanchez seem to favor.I'm being unfair. Mitsouko is a complicated scent that unfolds in 3 acts, like a play. In the first act, it's impossible to tell what the characters are really like - everyone is so polished, shiny and white, like sticky rice, but there are hints of something else peeking through, a heavy, sexed underbelly to the their boiled-clean facades.
When the curtain opens on act two, we've got high melodrama of Shalimar proportions, an amber-myrhh-frankincense-vanilla free for all with a hint of candied fruit, sweet and spicy and strong. Everyone's having sex with everyone else; there's incest, deception, flattery, and shame, maybe a drug addiction thrown in for good measure.
Everyone settles down by Act 3 to a sweet spicy drydown that nonetheless weighs on you like eternal regret. Periodically, the memory of those events waft up with renewed force, and you have to relive them again, again, again.
Jeebus. I need to figure out a way to learn about orientals, but it sure as hell won't be through Mitsouko, though I do love the initial sticky rice smell, which is a really pleasant and creative surprise.
3 comments:
The play you are describing sounds uncannily like A Long Day's Journey into Night by Eugene O'Neill.
Also, Mitsouko has a really pretty bottle. Possibly my favorite bottle of all time.
But I sniffed it this weekend and your review does it justice. All I can say is I like it better than Shalimar.
I think I was thinking of some amalgam of Suddenly Last Summer and The Wayward Bus. Eugene O'Neill also does the trick, though.
The bottle I sniffed was a mini, so it was just kind of petite and square (it did have a pretty label, though).
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