MISUNDERSTOOD (INCOMPRESA) — CANNES 2014

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Asia Argento’s third film as director finds her excavating the messy ground of a coming-of-age story about Aria, a 9-year-old Italian girl.

Giulia Salerno’s winning portrayal of Aria, a young girl torn between separated wealthy and semi-famous parents (dad is a film actor and mom is a concert pianist), is the film’s strongest ingredient. But however compelling Salerno’s performance, it only goes so far toward compensating for an episodic script without a significant arc.

Aria flits between stay-overs with her narcissistic father (Gabriel Garko) and romantically immature mother (Charlotte Gainsbourg). Her father’s hot and cold temperament causes him to reject Aria just as quickly as he extends affection. Mom’s reliably unreliable suitors aren’t the kind of men you’d leave your child alone with.

From a visual perspective, production designer Eugenia F. di Napoli uses bold primary colors reminiscent of the colorful look of Argento’s much-loved father Dario Argento’s giallo horror films. The effect frequently overpowers the dramatic nature of the story.

In its off-putting climax, co-screenwriter Barbara Alberti reneges on the narrative’s playful tone with a character-breaking crisis decision that leaves the audience with a pit in its stomach, and no hope for Aria’s limited future.

“Misunderstood” is a movie that fails to shine any ostensibly promised light on the plight of a little girl who comes to take her problems far too seriously for her age.

Not Rated. 103 mins.

GOODBYE TO LANGUAGE — CANNES 2014

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Leave it to Jean-Luc Godard, one of the originators of the Nouvelle Vague movement, to make a 3D movie that makes dramatic narrative use of the frequently misused technology to break the proscenium window.

Hollywood could learn something from “Goodbye to Language” considering that it hasn’t “broken the window” on any of its 3D movies since “My Bloody Valentine” from 2009.

When a woman washes her hands in a leaf-strewn fountain, her experience of dipping her hands into the crystal-clear water is more palpable than any filmic encounter you’ve ever had.

During nocturnal car-driving sequences, suspenseful music creates moods found in traditional films before succumbing to a soundscape of natural and artificial resonances. Godard orchestrates the soundtrack to create constant modulations and tonal shifts. The screen sometimes goes black. Inexplicable blood runs down a bathtub drain. “Is society willing to accept murder as a means to fight unemployment?” Godard provokes and dares the viewer to listen and think. Think for yourself.

Employing the editorial collage technique he developed while making films with the Dziga Vertov Group collective (see “British Sounds” - 1969), Godard poses questions about culture, nature, war, and relationships between men and women in a context of how, what, and why people communicate. He foresees a near future when people will only be told by technology what to think and feel.
A government authority terrorist exits a black sedan to fire his gun into the air to threaten a woman whose fearless proclamation that she “doesn’t care” disorients the brute to the point of impotence.

“Infinity and zero” are touted by a male lover to man’s greatest discoveries until his girlfriend says that “sex and death” are more significant.

“Goodbye to Language” is a vibrant think piece about modern man’s constant state of fear of the Frankenstein culture of violence that governments and corporations have created. Godard views the dichotomy between nature and industrial degradation with a sardonic eye. God couldn’t humble man, so he humiliates him. Absurdly visually abstract, the film keeps its audience on their toes.

“A dog is the only creature that loves you more than he loves himself.” Such deceptively simple observations overflow into the intimate relationship between two lovers whose frequently nude state finds constant acceptance, even during shared bathroom experiences. “Thought regains its place in poop.” Fritz Lang’s “Metropolis” plays on the living room flat-screen.

Godard pushes the flexible boundaries of cinema like a virtuoso avant-garde jazz musician painting colors on sound. That Godard uses his real-life girlfriend’s dog Roxy as a primary character though which we observe and contemplate man’s connection to nature, serves to endear the audience to an artistically liberated and fully expressed filmmaker with nothing to lose. Cinema doesn’t get any better.

Not Rated. 70 mins.

WETLANDS

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One-Woman Revolution
Charlotte Roche’s Novel Goes Big, and Nasty

Challenging and provocative, co-writer/director David Wnendt’s nervy adaptation of Charlotte Roche’s long-presumed unfilmable popular novel breaks new cinematic ground.

Mapping out the terrain of cinema’s previously uncharted psychosexual possibilities, Wnendt opens up a wide range of Roche’s proto-feminist issues around Helen, an 18-year-old German girl with pressing bodily issues.

Helen’s childhood of abuse by her now-divorced parents turns her into an autodidactic bisexual sexual adventurer obsessed with filthy toilets and other taboos, to provide her with sexual expression.

Foreign pubic hairs found on never-cleaned public-restroom toilet seats turn Helen on — big time. An early scene allows the filmmaker to take the audience on a humorous microscopic tour of dentally enabled microbes lurking on the alien terrain of just such a hair. The visually exciting scene makes virtuosic use of its graphic potential.

Impromptu sexual assignations with boys, girls, men, and women — whether in public or private places — feed Helen’s voracious appetite for the bizarre. Helen likes to keep her unclean vagina in a constant state of smelly flux. Some guys appreciate the foul odor and taste of her “cottage cheese” discharge; Helen certainly does. She uses her vaginal juices as perfume.

Not a movie for the squeamish, “Wetlands” nonetheless functions exquisitely on the shoulders, breasts, and troubled anus of its anti-heroine protagonist — as confidently played by relative newcomer Carla Juri. Anti-heroines don’t come much more twisted than Helen. An early flashback reveals an incident in which Helen’s mother (Meret Becker) encourages her young daughter to jump from a high platform into her arms before letting Helen crash to the ground instead of catching her. Mommy wants to teach Helen a lesson — “never trust anyone, not even your own parents.” That mom is a stickler for good feminine hygiene, provides Helen with an ideal device for her rebellious instincts to expand. Trading used tampons with her also bisexual best friend Corinna (Marlen Kruse) is on the menu.

Traces of Danny Boyle’s “Trainspotting” pop up in the filmmaker’s dynamic approach to the outré subject matter. Wnendt uses evocative music and songs to comment on, and energize, the fast-edited action. Static and natural imagery provide breathing room to the frequently shocking narrative. Flashbacks, reveries, and forward-moving action collide in imaginatively stylized sequences that serve to put the audience in a disoriented state. You’re not always sure of what’s real or imagined. The movie takes no prisoners. You either give yourself over to it or shut down to survive. Helen prides herself on doing things rough. She skateboards barefoot in the street.

A sloppy self-shaving session at home cuts into one of Helen’s perpetual hemorrhoids, causing a generously bleeding anal fissure that sends her to the hospital for an emergency operation. Our atheist heroine seizes the painful event as a chance to reunite her wacked-out parents — mom is a serial religion-dilettante — if she can protract her hospital stay long enough to get them in the same room together. Helen’s deception relies on her not moving her bowels.

Robin (Christoph Letkowski), an accommodating male nurse, falls under Helen’s charismatic spell thru her conversationally exclusive topic of sexually related stories and questions. It’s not an ethically responsible decision on Robin’s part, but there’s nothing morally reliable in Helen’s sleazy worldview. 

“Wetlands” is a palpable coming-of-age story that daringly embraces a thoroughly liberated (read individualistic) response to familial abuse. In so doing, the film creates, and acknowledges, a feminist position of untold potential that is equally constructive and destructive. Helen’s confrontational self-help program sprouts directly from her body and all of its dirty mysteries.

Here is a female force of nature that rejects religion and societally imposed rules of conduct, in favor of a DIY approach rooted in outrageous sexual behavior that weeds out 99% of the riff raff. Helen represents a different brand of one-percenter. The means and the end are evenly justified.

Not Rated. 109 mins.