A young German girl blithely embracing life's functions and fluids

Sophie Harrison's Guardian review of English-born, German-raised TV personality Charlotte Roche's novel Wetlands (which also explains a better translation of the title, Feuchtgebiete, is "Moist Areas") sums it up thus: "The novel's basic premise is that Helen has had sex, feels great about that, and is generally at home and easy with human fluids in a way that the rest of us are not." At one time the book, which livens up the female coming-of-age genre by talking of these matters in boundary-pushingly vivid terms while recounting her youthful sexual exploits, was the top bestseller worldwide.

Let's point out that "controversial bestseller" is a bit of an oxymoron. If anything is a bestseller, readers may be lured by titillation, but they stay because they like what they find. Variety's Scott Foundas calls the German movie version, the making of which seems an inevitable development, a "sort of YA Fifty Shades of Grey" and a "spiky, smartly packaged commercial enterprise" -- extending his riff on the hybrid it is by attributing to it "a hyper-pop music video style that suggests an early John Waters movie as remade by Michael Bay." A far-fetched analogy, perhaps, but the point is this is not an outsider, indie film but glossy, accessible stuff, with flashy, cheery visual effects and a girl star as fresh and clean-looking as a young Julie Andrews.

The book appeals, to the open-minded and non-squeamish, that is, because of its narrator's charm and sweetness, and likewise the movie provides perky, delightful, Julie Andrews-lookalike newcomer Carla Juri as Helen Memel, the 18-year-old protagonist, with a pleasant, humorous, girl-next-door quality that allows her to get across her grossièrté without grossing out sympathetic audiences. Bear in mind, Charlotte aimes to shock, and so does her surrogate, Helen. The book's or movie's success hinges on skirting the edge between the titillating and the stomach-turning, taking us into new areas and having us accept them as worth tiptoeing into.

Helen is in love with yuckiness. She experiments with vegetables for masturbation on screen (ginger, cucumber -- carrots, bingo!), and before the opening titles we see her blithely wade into a public restroom with her skateboard in flip-flops through several inches of dark, none-too-clean looking water. It comes as little surprise to gradually learn that, as the Guardian reviewer of the novel put it, "Her story is also a manifesto against prissy Anglo-American hygiene." This is where Helen's position of embracing body functions perhaps almost inevitably takes her -- though it may seem a reversal of how we usually think of German culture, as akin to the Swiss in a love of the antiseptic and well-scrubbed. In fact breakout star Juri is Swiss; perhaps only one of such origins best appreciates the boundaries being crossed, though the crossing may have been easier since the young lady is reportedly from the Italian-speaking part of Switerland, rather than the German. Or maybe I've got it all wrong, and Germans are much more into yuckiness and body fluids than southern Europeans or Brits.

Seeing things on screen can be a lot more intense for some than reading about them on the page, making material of this specially tricky to, adapt, but this kind of vivid visualization, including computer animations of toilet seat bacteria, and semi-microscopic travels around Helen's body, turns into what Wnendt seems to most enjoy running with, and the aspect that will make the movie memorable. In the event, not every juicy detail of the book makes it onto the screen, of course, but moments like Helen wiping her ass all over a dirty toilet seat (in the waterlogged public restroom) and a group of guys masturbating onto a pizza may leave lasting impressions. The wallowing-in-germs aspect has a semi-scientific basis. As Helen boasts, "I have never even had a yeast infection. I have a very healthy pussy flora": excessive hygiene can be counter-productive, preventing the body from developing necessary antibodies. But bad hygiene can be dangerous too.

Of course Helen's fantasies and memories take her elsewhere, but the book transpires entirely in a hospital room after surgery. Shaving her nether region has led to a slip of the razor, a behind gushing blood, and the need for some quick surgery and sewing up. To avoid feeling tied down, the film rearranges things, and in doing so, despite lots of voice over, loses some novelistic intimacy.

Otherwise Helen has young-girl problems. She constantly tries to use her body-frankness and suggestive talk to seduce her ambivalent, often interested male nurse (Christoph Letkowski), and naively but touchingly hopes that her hospital crisis will reverse her parents' recent divorce. She, her girlfriend Corinna (Marlen Kruse), and her boyfriend (Florian Rummel) all emerge in her flashbacks as leaning a bit in the direction of kink. Eventually it turns out there's a childhood trauma that's eating away at her. She may need more therapy than simply plunging into sex and being frank about excretions. Nonetheless, though some reviewers have speculated that Helen is as crazy as the author of The Bell Jar and therefore equally inappropriate as a feminist role-model, her growing up to be a perfectly nice young lady seems a quite possible outcome.

By the way: her dad (Axel Milberg) is rich. These are rich-girl games, though Helen's humor, daring and sense of play are all her own And the enthusiasm with which Carla Juri embodies these qualities from minute to minute is the key to why this is a fun watch. Also invaluable of course in achieving the film's entertainment value are Wnendt's buoyant direction, his screenplay co-written with Claus Falkenberg, Jakub Bejnarowicz's bright photography, and Andreas Wodraschke's brisk and seamless editing, which add up to that bright, shiny package we spoke of at the outset.

Wetlands/Feuchtgebiete, 105 mins., debuted at Locarno in 2013 and played at Sundance January 2014 and other US and international festivals. It comes out (The Match Factory, Strand Releasing) in NYC September 5, 2014 and September 19 in the Bay Area. New on DVD & Blu-ray January 13th 2015.

_________________
©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.