Helen is a rebellious teen skateboarder. She is deliberately unhygienic to rebel against her unstable mother. Her parents are divorced. Her mother has had many men and as many religions. Her father hurts her unintentionally. Her best friend Corinna often makes poor choices in boys. She accidentally cut herself while shaving causing an anal fissure. Her hospitalization gives her an idea to reunite her parents and then she falls for nurse Robin.This German film pushes the sexual envelop with some aggressive subject matters. It doesn't shy away and lead actress Carla Juri is all too happy to push. Some of it is funny and a lot of it is shocking. If it doesn't offend, this movie actually delivers a compelling original character. However, I bet many would be offended or at least find some of this off-putting.

I am a student and admirer of the works Antoine Artaud and am very pleased to see a movie breathing the spirit of my second favorite insane Frenchman. This movie is aimed at the idiots who think they have to bear children. The body fluids and bleeding assholes are metaphors for what happens in the minds of children of infantile parents. I'm not big on symbolism in movies, but this thing a Bosch puzzle, it just goes on an on.. Four guys jerking off in a pizza, I think it's brilliant, think about it, what do these parents feed their kids spiritually? Crap topped with crap. It is no wonder says she has had herself sterilized because she doesn't want any kids. The sad and also - in a perverted way - beauty of the end is that, life repeats itself. The asshole represents the circle of life. This is what Fassbinder would make if he would be alive. Have you paid attention to the face lines of this woman? It's very similar to Fassbinder's heroins. Life is good in Germany, you can tell by movies like this. No freedom for an honest movie here in the US.

This movie is certainly not for everyone. If thinking of a oozing zit makes you gag, if you get queasy at the sight of blood, if you suffer from nosocomephobia, or tomophobia, or if any mention of bodily fluids instantly offends your sensitivity, i'm sorry to say you'll never get to enjoy this beautiful little movie.If, on the other hand, you're one of those people who, like me, see Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings as a bittersweet shift from a brilliant career in gore (Braindead, Bad Taste, Meet the Feebles); if you share a morbid fascination for human anatomy (in all its scatological glory), or simply find the cultural taboos surrounding it ridiculously irrational; you'll absolutely love this movie.Trying to describe Wetlands, to me, instantly evokes Jeunet's Amélie (as weird as that may sound). They are of course two very different movies, but in the same way, i think, as the modern tale of Sleeping Beauty is so prudishly different from the original Grimm's tale. Both movies essentially revolve around a quirky and naive young woman with family issues striving to find love and meaning in her life through the weirdest and most hare-brained schemes imaginable. And, in that regard, Carla Juni's prodigious embodiment of her character perfectly rivals Audrey Tatou's equally spectacular performance.If you can only find the same charm in Helen's quirkiness as you did in Amélie's, and get past all the visceral lewdness, you'll find Wetlands doesn't really aim to offend or disgust, as some critics would claim. The fact is, those who could only point at that aspect of this movie, were just sadly incapable of braking through that moral wall and seeing beyond it. Some people, of course, will never be able to appreciate the beauty of a garden, because they're too repulsed by the smell of manure...

There is nothing that could concise David Wnendt's Feuchtgebiete aka Wetlands in a single word. Well if one's given the liberty to express what they'd seen or rather witnessed in a plethora of words, it'd most likely be something close to obscene, disgusting, repulsive and most of all shocking. If you've seen its red band previews, you can figure out instantly whether the movie is for you or not. On the other hand if you thought this'd be a usual sex- comedy with some gross factor, believe me when I tell ya what you saw in the preview is nothing compared to the movie. Nothing will prepare you for Wetlands' odd 105 minutes.Greeted initially with a splendid shot of a skater girl, it quickly goes downhill before you can say "ugh". Wetlands follows the sexual and unhygienic adventures of Helen Memel, a girl who is hellbent on making her life as unhygienic as possible and labeling it as her 'experiments'. Helen played charmingly by Carla Juri, is on an experiment with her own genitals and whatnot as she initially states in the movie. Its kind of a parallel she draws with how she feels for her parents and their divorce. While light at heart, the seemingly damaged 18 year old as Helen may seem it also brings out how bad she needed to be loved.Beneath the layers of her weird habits and unimaginable sexual fantasies, lies the conflict with herself and an intense yearning for her parents' reconciliation. And Carla Juri does justice to the role. Her performance was inexplicably good, shuffling from cute and sexy to crude and repelling seemed like an easy feat for her. Right from the CG titles, her narration reminded me sorely of David Fincher's Fight Club.I for one consider myself hardened, watching movies like A Serbian Film, The Human Centipede, Martyrs, Inside, Hostel or even Salo but there were scenes in Wetlands that truly deserved to be called cringe worthy. I wouldn't suggest Wetlands for the faint of heart/stomach or the more perverse either. As evident from the trailers this was marketed as a over the top raunchy comedy but if you overlook all those gross and perverse segments (which is hard I know), there is a sensibly written story about the perils a late- adolescent girl goes though be it physical or emotional. This movie does a decent or rather an indecent job of blending the aversion with a story of someone who aches for some love. I wonder if the same would work had it been a male lead, and of course an immediate reminiscence was Qaushiq Mukherjee's Gandu.