Written by Andé Morgan.
Wetlands (2013) is the “most WTF, NSFW movie,” or at least that’s what its promotional materials can’t wait to tell you. So you might be forgiven for expecting a one-note gross-out film with copious amounts of Euronudity, and you would be (sort of) right. Explicit unsanitary behavior is the film’s party piece, but it’s much more than that. It’s the best kind of gimmick: the kind that works.
Wetlands was written and directed by German auteur David Wnendt (Combat Girls, 2011). It was adapted from the 2008 book of the same name by Charlotte Roche (actually, Feuchtgebiete, if we’re going to keep it real Deutsch). The novel was a well-received bestseller, though some critics have described it (often while clutching their pearls) as erotic fiction or pornography.
The film was originally released at the Locarno Film Festival in 2013, and was shown at Sundance in 2014. It’s currently in limited release in the United States through October. The story follows Helen Memel (Carla Juri), a young woman with an almost pathological obsession with filth, as she hits common Bildungsroman beats, e.g., sex, friendship, rebellion, divorced parents, and family secrets.
The films opens with Helen skateboarding barefoot down a grey street in a generic German city. She stops to apply hemorrhoid cream in what may be the filthiest abandoned subway restroom ever. Helen’s voiceover details her long suffering with the affliction, and we’re also told that her mother always says good hygiene Down There (in the wetlands, get it?) is important because a “pussy is dirtier than a penis.” Helen shows us her own feelings about hygiene by grinding her vulva in a circular motion around the dirty toilet seat.
This opening sequence also establishes three overarching elements:
1. Helen represents the antithesis of the modern western woman and her pedantic attention to personal hygiene fostered by years of exposure to patriarchal cultural norms and manipulative advertising.
2. The restroom is flooded, covered in two inches of chocolate-brown water filled with cigarette butts and other refuse. As she sits on the toilet, we see Helen’s bare feet firmly planted in the water. Her acts and the filthy water seem like part of a perverse baptism, one that rejects the symbolic purification and rebirth associated with traditional Christian baptism. Later, critical moments often involve Helen’s or someone else’s immersion in water in line with the more conventional symbology, culminating with Helen’s inundation in the final scene.
3. This film is pretty. For example, midway through the sequence we get a beautiful, slick opening credits animation that will ensure that you never think about pubic hair and pee stains in the same way. It also sets the precedent for the look of the rest of the film: simultaneously cozy and disorienting, with the commercial refinement of a car advertisement (BMW or Mercedes, of course).
The action quickly shifts to Helen’s hospital room (these scenes may have been filmed in the local IKEA’s nurse’s station). She’s recovering from surgery done to remove an anal fissure gained while she was shaving her anus. By this point, we’ve heard Helen expound favorably on men’s preferred vaginal discharge texture (cottage cheese, in her experience), so her desire to be completely clean shaven seems discordant. Through flashbacks, we learn her motivation for this act. We’re then introduced to her best friend and neighbor, Corinna (Marlen Kruse), who has recently been alienated at her high school due to her willingness to indulge her former boyfriend’s coprophilia. Helen instructs Corinna to dab some of her own vaginal secretions behind her ears to attract the attention of their mutual acquaintance and dealer, Toni (Ludger Bökelmann).
We also meet Helen’s divorced parents, played by Meret Becker and Axel Milberg. Quite unlike Helen, Becker’s character is tidy to a fault. She also suffers from depression and personality disorder, and once cut off 8-year-old Helen’s eyelashes to teach her a lesson about vanity. Milberg’s character is oblivious to the pain he causes his family by his self-centered nature. In another childhood flashback his inattentive and ineffective application of sunscreen to 8-year-old Helen’s back results in a severe sunburn. Another scene shows a young Helen delighted to be allowed to suck on her father’s used avocado pit, saying that it was “almost like they’d kissed.” This exemplifies her desperate desire for acknowledgment by her father. Present-day Helen’s only non-sex-and-drugs hobby is tending several avocado pits suspended in plastics water cups, a group she calls her “family.”
The balance of the story concerns Helen’s use of her hospital stay as the linchpin of a guileless scheme to get her parents to reconcile and remarry. She also courts Robin (Christoph Letkowski), the male nurse assigned to monitor her recovery. By court, I mean she alternates between crying out for relief from her loneliness and attempting to seduce Robin with faux Cool Girl grossness.
Helen’s relationship with her mother doesn’t progress very far, but it is eventually implied that a family secret involving her mother may be the root cause of Helen’s self-destructive behavior. More dynamic is Helen and Corinna’s friendship. We see them share drugs, a bath, and, later, their used tampons. After swapping cotton, Helen runs her bloody fingers over Corinna’s face and deems her “blood sister.” Corinna reciprocates. What this scene lacks in subtlety it makes up for in impact.
While the first two acts imply otherwise, in the final act we learn that Helen is actually much more dependent on Corinna than vice versa. When she discovers that Corinna is pregnant by Toni, Helen, driven by her fear of loneliness, lashes out at her friend and contemplates suicide. Helen has recently been sterilized by choice because she refuses to perpetuate the mental illness that afflicts the women in her maternal lineage.
Helen’s graphic disregard for hygiene as a symbol of her rejection of conventional gender and familial norms does begin to feel a bit gimmicky towards the end of the film, but it is also very effective at relaying the impact of her mother’s illness and her parent’s divorce on her development. Some other symbolic imagery, like the surreal scene of an avocado plant growing from pit to several feet high from Helen’s vagina, is similarly heavy handed.
Other commentary on the plight of women include the male medical staffs’ casual disregard for Helen’s autonomy or ability to assess her own health. Following the surgery, Dr. Notz (Edgar Selge), laughs off Helen’s concerns about malpractice by saying “girls her age are prone to hysteria.” Later, a scene involving four men, a pizza, and some Olympics-level synchronized ejaculation evokes conventional concerns about the dehumanizing effects of pornography and subsequent propagation of rape culture by male viewers.
To his credit, Wnendt is largely successful in avoiding employment of the male gaze. The camera rarely lingers on Helen’s body during scenes with incidental nudity. Sex scenes depict both male and female nudity with either cozy familiarity or clinical coldness. So, while it is certainly explicit, and may be erotic, Wetlands is hardly pornographic.
Don’t be fooled by reviews that focus on the bodily fluids and sex — Wetlands excels at using shocking imagery to break down walls and build our connection to the characters. The result is singular, warm take on the female coming-of-age story for the whole (very modern) family.
Andé Morgan lives in Tucson, Arizona, where they write about film, television, and current events. Follow them @andemorgan.