Wetlands Film Review

Transcript:

Wetlands, AKA Feuchtgebiete, is a German film based on the best-selling, but highly controversial, book by Charlotte Roche. It was released in Germany in 2013 (it has yet to secure a UK release), is directed by David Wnendt and stars Swiss actor Carla Juri.

The story follows the The adventures of an eccentric girl named Helen who has very different attitudes towards hygiene and sexuality and longs for the reunion of her divorced parents. I watched this film a couple of nights ago and – whilst I've seen many movies of this nature before – was pretty stunned at the audaciousness of it all.

You watch Helen rub her vagina on dirty toilet seats with glee, savour smeg left on her hands long after she's finished tossing someone off and is eternally rubbing her vaginal juices all over her body to attract men. There's also a large amount of self-inflicted anal violence too.

Now you're probably thinking shit, that doesn't sound like something I wanna watch but it's all done in such a punk, joyously cartoon-y way you can't help but laugh and cheer her on. The visual style of the film helps a lot here. Right from the Fight Club echoing title sequence we get a playful, inventive visual style that pops from start to finish, blurring reality and fiction.

There are fantasy sequences, stylistic inter-titles and POV shots aplenty which all serve to match Helen's free-wheeling and carefree lifestyle. This narrative focus also probably wouldn't work without Carla Juri in the lead role – she absolutely sells the shit out of this character. In someone else's hands she could very easily become a hateful, disgusting and annoying character but Juri goes for broke with her incredibly brave performance and injects just enough vulnerability and pathos to the role.

Also worth noting are both Meret Becker and Axel Milberg – the former hilariously (and scarily) embodying Helen's neurotic mother and the latter giving a more low key performance as her absent father.

The story covers quite a bit of ground with a fair few characters coming in and out but mostly follows Helen around on her misadventures until she is hospitalised. At which point her attempts to reunite her divorced parents takes on more importance. Once this occurs the film does lose some narrative urgency but subtly swaps the kinetic tone of the first act for a deeper probe into the substantial drama at play.

SPOILERS

During the course of the film we are fed little segments of a flashback, being shown more and more as the film goes on. We finally come to know that Helen suffered a huge family trauma as a child and, although it is a powerful revelation, the film seems to suggest that this in some way explains her outlandish behaviour and that this behaviour is a negative symptom of it.

For me this undercut the counter-culture message and tone of the film somewhat and felt a little too neat and shallow of a dramatic conclusion to be introduced this late in the game.

SPOILERS END

So yeah, overall I liked Wetlands. It was funny, visually appealing, had some good dramatic depth, a refreshingly anarchic tone and a great soundtrack. It's transgressive with a good message about the fact that bodies and sex are gross and people should just get over that and mostly progressive with its attitude towards femininity in terms of what it shows and who it focuses on.

That said the pacing could have been a little tighter, the constant blurring of flashbacks, dreams, fantasy and reality became difficult to keep track of. I also thought the ending seemed a little at odds with the rest of the film and felt like, although it's myriad of influences were appreciated, the direction style could have been a little more disciplined.

I'm going to give Wetlands a 7/10 and would recommend it to fans of films like Kids, Trainspotting and Pink Flamingos.

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