The dynamic and clever first shot of David Wnendt’s film, Wetlands, introduces teenage Helen (Carla Juri) as confident, poised and self-assured. This opening sequence also establishes her fascination with her private parts. Helen suffers from chronic hemorrhoids and frequently has a finger stuck into her rectum, which the audience gets to first witness as she expertly skateboards down a Berlin street. Next in Helen’s bag of tricks or attitude towards personal hygiene is her philosophy about mating. In order to attract a sexual partner, she feels that it is important to cultivate her “flora” so that it produces an aphrodisiac scent. In order to achieve this effect, she visits a disgusting public restroom where she diligently rubs her genitals around the entire filthy toilet seat—complete with dried urine and pubic hair that Wnendt explores and analyzes in hyper-extreme close up. Sound appealing? This is the first 90 seconds of the film and hardly the end of the ride. It is quite possible that there are more bodily fluids expelled, examined and experimented with than in any other film in recent memory.
In a flashback to Helen’s childhood, her mother offers the advice, “Trust no one, not even your parents,” and then, in a perverse and sadistic manner, proceeds to drive her point home. Whether or not things get better for Helen is relative.
With no one else to rely on or trust, Helen grows up taking care herself and, when her self-absorbed parents divorce, she struggles to make sense of human relationships. Helen travels through life oddly detached from it yet seeking companionship as she tries to answer the self-imposed riddle of herself. While she conducts intimate experiments with her body, the world at large is her laboratory.
After the public restroom experience, she puts her “flora” to the test, picking up a young stud, jerking him off and then walking home with a handful of his “product” drying on her palm. Next, she raids the vegetable drawer of the refrigerator and conducts a study to determine which plant is best suited for masturbation. The answer, for those who have to know: Carrots, yes. Ginger, no.
While the number of perverse episodes becomes slightly fewer and farther between as the film progresses, the shock value never wanes. The ample display of stuff that can come out of or go into a body would quickly become tiresome and empty if it was not in the service of a strong narrative.
More a character study than a conventional plot, at the core, Wetlands is about damage—the damage Helen and her brother experienced at the hands of their self-absorbed parents, the fallout from the divorce and the things Helen does to herself in order to feel something more than pain. Unfortunately, despite her lust for life and almost fairy-like disposition, Helen is truly hurt inside, and when she is genuinely, physically wounded in an unlikely but ultimately rather serious shaving accident, she is hospitalized.
In the hospital, she experiences treatment, concern and nurturing like she has never experienced. The hospital becomes something of a home for her. Even though her surgery is routine, successful, relatively risk-free and the kind of procedure that usually only dictates an overnight recovery period, Helen conspires to extend her stay by secretly moving her bowels but denying it to doctors and nurses who say that she can be released once she is able to “evacuate.” It is while bedridden in this new and stable environment, that, in an almost Disney-like turn, she concocts a plot to bring her parents back together.
Of course, Helen, being Helen, she develops an infatuation with a hot male nurse assigned to her case. Reluctant and professional at first, he eventually opens up to Helen, discusses his off-and-on relationship with another nurse on the floor, and Helen tantalizes him with tales of her exploits—some of them real, some of them perhaps made up or embellished for the sake of her somewhat captive audience.
In case, it was not already apparent, Helen is genuinely troubled. Her lively experiences with sex and her body are initially presented in the context of a character who is a free spirit, wildly comfortable in her own skin but what eventually emerges is almost exactly the opposite.
Wetlands is relentlessly engaging thanks to Wnedt’s exhilarating, exuberant direction and his profoundly self-assured command of the form. He proves himself to be both technically adept but also steadfastly and sensitively concerned with story and subtext. In Juri, he has a lead actress who can say more with a blank stare than a roomful of earnest method actors. We feel her pain even if we can’t see it.
To say that Wetlands is not for everyone feels false. Some viewers will be turned off by things they see onscreen, but that is unfortunate because, at the heart of this film, is something that, deep down, a lot of people can relate to, recognize and, hopefully, connect with.
Director: David Wnendt
Writers: David Wnendt, Claus Falkenberg
Starring: Carla Juri, Christoph Letkowski, Meret Becker
Release Date: Sept. 5, 2014 (New York), Sept. 12, 2014 (L.A.)