Slightly Stinky Cologne: A Snapshot from Woman's Picture

Woman's Picture: Snapshot 3 - Slightly Stinky from brian pera on Vimeo.


Woman's Picture is a film series I started this year, the episodes of which for the most part focus on women characters and their relationships with each other, with men, and with perfume.  The first full length episode comes out in September, on evelynavenue.com, luckyscent.com, and a few other sites online, coinciding with the release of the first fragrance in Andy Tauer's new line of perfumes, Tableau de Parfums.  The Tableau fragrances relate to the shorts in the Woman's Picture series.

The first three episodes we filmed for Woman's Picture are playing at festivals over the next year or so as a sort of movie triptych, starting on July 11 at Outfest in Los Angeles.  You can check the Outfest.org website for showtimes.  Woman's Picture is a ten year series and will broadcast online, at festivals, and in theaters, and each episode will be released on DVD.

Ingrid, featured in this "snapshot", a shorter short from the series, loves perfume, but Mackie, her male friend, loves it even more.  He's one of the only guys in the series so far to really represent my fascination with fragrance and he embodies certain fearless, even confrontational attitudes I wish I could pull off myself.

In this short, Mackie and Ingrid have stopped at a cafe before a visit to Ingrid's mother.  Ingrid hasn't seen her mother--or been back to her home town--in ten years, so she's nervous, and wants Mackie to behave, even though she probably secretly cherishes his need to shock and agitate social conventions.  I imagine he has enough perfume on to sink a small ocean liner.  I imagine he thinks of it as a special kind of armor to keep boring people and the restrictions they might try to impose on him at bay.

It was fun playing Mackie.  It gave me a chance to be a lot more bold than I tend to be in person, in my own life.  I'm always so quiet when I shop for perfume, for instance.  I play it safe with all the sales associates.  I sometimes pretend I'm buying perfume for a girlfriend, though I'm buying it for myself nine times out of seven.  Mackie is a great alter ego to slip into on film because he just doesn't care.  Like me he might say outlandish or highly opinionated things, but he doesn't worry too much about the consequences, or what people think.  I trouble over every little thing I say, wanting ultimately to be understood and liked.  I think Mackie knows who his friends are, knows who is worth worrying about - like Ingrid, for instance.  The rest he doesn't spend too much time considering.

I always want to be Mackie when I walk into a perfume store.  Instead I end up a very pale imitation.  I try to be nice and patient and I feign ignorance so as not to make anyone feel I think I know more.  I fumble through interactions with sales associates a little bit.  I'm still scared to spray perfume on, unless it's something in the men's section.  It seems bizarre to me that at my age and after all this time loving perfume I'm still so nervous and worried out among people.  Mackie is the friend I always wanted to have - the kind of guy who would go with you and give you the balls to douse yourself in Poison, right out for the world to see.  I pretend he's with me when I hit Sephora at the mall.