Wetlands

Helen is the tousled hair star of "Wetlands." Her destiny: "So I turned myself into a living-hygiene-experiment!" Based on the book of the same name, the movie is a fanciful frolic through the body's holes and its many secretions, a journey through which Helen finds herself by way of an anal fissure. Think: "Trainspotting" with a vagina. She's not afraid to wipe her bare ass across a filthy toilet seat, take mobile phone pics of men's faces as she jerks them off, insert anything (vaginal fluids, male spunk, a carrot). In most movies, everything is withheld; here, everything is exposed and examined under a microscope. Helen offers herself up to us as a totemic feast to feed our carnal desires. As such, she is everything we are not: exposed, daring, unguarded. Her hobbies include "fucking" and growing avocados. "I just got nothing to hide," she explains. Of course, no normal family could produce a young woman so unabashed. Her brutal mother swaps boyfriends and religions, and her father can barely contain his raging libido; Helen is their collateral damage. After she cuts her ass shaving her butthole, she ends up on the hospital, where she develops a relationship with a male nurse, and we wait for Helen to poop ("The sooner you shit, the sooner you go," a female nurse scolds). Despite all the sex, holes, and issues, reproduction is verboten. Helen has sterilized herself, and pregnancy is equated with a turducken. What's best about "Wetlands" is that it offers a vision of the opposite of contemporary American feminism, the members of which spend all their time policing their bodies' boundaries and the behaviors of others. In Helen's postfeminist self-love orgy, politics are just, well, too boring and dry. The closest thing to a political act we get in this movie is when Helen trades used tampons with her best friend, noting, "It's my way of cutting into America's tampon industry profits." Bless her heart.