Helen Memel (Carla Juri), the protagonist of German director David Wnendt's Wetlands, is a wild, sexually voracious woman in her early 20s who has developed alarming scatological obsessions, fixating over bacteria and bodily fluids. Her severely dysfunctional, neurotic parents ruined her by depriving her of healthy affection and instilling her with bizarre attitudes toward sex during childhood. As a teen and adult, she began to systematically rebel against her folks (and society as a whole) by engaging in activities that most of us would find repulsive - wading barefoot through excrement and urine-filled subway stations, writhing around in filthy public urinals, performing bizarre sexual "experiments" with foreign objects such as produce, and taking on an endless array of bedmates, some of whom preferred stimula far weirder than traditional intercourse. As the story opens, Helen has a bloody accident while shaving and winds up in the hospital with a fissure on her anus. While recovering, she begins to reflect on her self-destructive depravity, from childhood on - experiences depicted via an endless number of flashbacks and dream and fantasy sequences. Working from a controversial bestselling novel by Charlotte Roche, Wnendt and scriptwriter Claus Falkenberg approach this extreme material as a sardonic arthouse shocker - an impudent seriocomedy laden with a nonstop barrage of gross-out setpieces that would make the Farrelly Brothers blush - most of them, at least for the first hour, played for laughs. The filmmakers never really set up an actual joke; instead, they attempt to get by on embarrassment alone, much of it conveyed not with explicit visual detail, but on the soundtrack. The effect is not unlike what Hitchcock brought off in the shower scene of Psycho - Wnendt gets us to imagine far more than what is actually present on camera. For instance, he sets up a scene where a pus-filled blister on Carla's rectum bursts open and squirts an examining physician in the eye - but we never actually see the wound, merely hear the awful noise and glimpse the result. The movie is filled with yocks like this, and for about 45 minutes, you find yourself laughing at the director's sheer audacity - as in an ingeniously conceived opening sequence that uses CG animation to journey inside the microbial netherworld of a grody toilet seat. Wnendt depicts the vermin as a series of psychedelic creatures swarming around and devouring one another, with hundreds of razor-sharp teeth and snapping jaws. The movie also succeeds for a time when it cross-sections Helen's psyche. The filmmakers give us a window into the roots of her dysfunction, dramatizing (and in some cases, playing ironically) the child abuse that effectively destroyed her sanity as a little girl and adolescent. The filthy, rude humor and the underlying revelations work hand-in-hand, and we start to get a bifurcated glimpse of this troubled individual - suddenly grasping how she remained a malevolent, crass little girl into adulthood, a warped woman-child who gets her kicks from horrifying anyone who crosses her path. No complaints here about the basic conceit, but after an hour or so, the film really starts to drag. It repeats the said insights about Helen ad infinitum, in dozens of different variations and capacities, and you realize at some point that the narrative isn't building. One is reminded of John Guare's cutting insight to Louis Malle after a screening of Pretty Baby: "Louis, it's a shame you didn't work with a writer on this picture; it could have been good." The same criticism applies here: though Wnendt's direction is imaginative and artful, for much of its second hour the film seems totally aimless, as if Wnendt and Falkenberg set up the character of Helen and had no idea how to arc her, no sense of how to drive the story forward. Then the picture degenerates from boring to infuriating in the final 15 or 20 minutes; it grows unreasonably cruel and nasty, culminating with Helen's decision to commit a heartbreaking (and gory, and disgusting) act of mutilation against her own body. And then, somehow, without any sort of credible logic connecting the scenes, the filmmakers take this young woman who is thoroughly deranged and suicidal, and give her an improbable, ridiculous happy ending. If they had followed the story along its natural course, she would almost certainly have killed herself. The one saving grace in this picture is Juri - a vibrant, courageous young actress with a decade of work behind her. She has a freshness and a vitality that are rare among movie stars of her age, and the sort of pulchritude and bearing that could make any young man fall head-over-heels in love with her. Wnendt's major predecessor in the realm of button-pushing scat comedy is the Yugoslavian maverick Dusan Makavejev, who with his 1974 Sweet Movie set the standard for this kind of thing. There are stories about the Cannes press screening of Sweet Movie completely emptying out, except for a few devoted filmgoers engrossed and amused enough to stick it through. Watching Wetlands with these anecdotes in your mind, you want to give the movie the same sort of tenacity and commitment as the Makavejev viewers, but it doesn't really work, because the film peters out as soon as its formula becomes apparent. The difference with Makavejev is that he was clever, random and inventive enough with his narrative structure that you literally had no idea where the movie would end up, which kept you involved; in other words, the film had something deeper to offer beneath its shocks, and you couldn't help but feel that Makavejev was working toward something big and profound, with his Reichian philosophical undercurrents. Here you grasp the point rather quickly and eventually start groaning at the sophomoric hijinx and getting a headache.
