Animal Kingdom

ANIMAL KINGDOM            A-       

Australia  (112 mi)  2010   ‘Scope  d:  David Michôd

I'm lying alone with my head on the phone
Thinking of you till it hurts
I know you hurt too but what else can we do
Tormented and torn apart

I wish I could carry your smile and my heart
For times when my life feels so low
It would make me believe what tomorrow could bring
When today doesn't really know, doesn't really know

Chorus:
I 'm all out of love, I'm so lost without you
I know you were right believing for so long
I 'm all out of love, what am I without you
I can't be too late to say that I was so wrong

I want you to come back and carry me home
Away from this long lonely nights
I'm reaching for you, are you feeling it too
Does the feeling seem oh so right

And what would you say if I called on you now
And said that I can't hold on
There's no easy way, it gets harder each day
Please love me or I'll be gone…I'll be gone

Chorus
I 'm all out of love, I'm so lost without you
I know you were right believing for so long
I 'm all out of love, what am I without you
I can't be too late to say that I was so wrong

—“All Out of Love” from the album Lost in Love, by Air Supply (1980), Air Supply - All Out Of Love - YouTube (3:50)

When was the last time there were not one, or two, but three brilliant films to come out of Sundance capable of being called Top Fifteen films of the year?  Umm…never.   

"Winter's Bone" (Grand Jury Prize Dramatic), #3

"Animal Kingdom" (World Cinema Jury Prize, Dramatic), #11

"Restrepo" (Grand Jury Prize Documentary), #14

A bit like Audiard’s 2010 Top Ten Films of the Year: #10 A Prophet (Un Prophète), only this one’s told from the perspective of life on the outside instead of life on the inside of prison.  Using a spare narration from a dull, socially inept, oversized teenaged kid, James Frecheville as Joshua, who in the opening sequence waits for the paramedics to arrive too late to help his overdosed mother.  This begins his journey with his new family, career bank robbers seen in a crime spree captured in black and white surveillance photos over the opening credits, who happen to be his uncles all living under the care of their notorious mother, Grandma Cody (Jacki Weaver), otherwise known as Mother Smurf, who has a face like a ventriloquist’s dummy with a constant smile etched on her face, a woman who just wants to be around “the boys” wherever they are and whatever they may be doing.  She is hilarious every time she instructs these cold-blooded criminals to give her a hug, as she feels she’s the emotional backbone of the family, keeping their volatile tempers under control.  Joshua is more an observer or innocent bystander who just happens to be there, as he could just as easily be anywhere, so nothing seems out of the ordinary to him as these are his relatives.  When he gets his first taste of what a gun can do, it’s more amusing than anything else, as no one gets hurt, but the gun certainly makes other hardened outlaws back off, which for his uncles is mere child’s play.  Without ever saying much, his quiet nature soon begins to arouse the suspicion of his uncles, exacerbated by their own insane paranoia that comes from excessive cocaine use, where they wonder who he might be talking to.  As the family is under 24-hour police surveillance, these nagging suspicions only grow more irritable over time.  When the police bring the whole family in for questioning, their paranoia goes overboard, thinking he’s just a kid, but he may be a weak link.  Interesting that this is another hair-raising story about a teenager who through no fault of their own becomes unwillingly initiated into the nightmarish adult world of their criminal families, which is the exact same subject of the other Sundance film, Debra Granik’s 2010 Top Ten Films of the Year: #3 Winter's Bone.  Each play out, however, as differently as possible.  Both are unflinching portraits of a criminal underworld rarely seen, this is tough and hard-edged, while Granik’s rural, outsider approach is more poetic and character-driven. 

The foreboding opening narration is wise beyond Joshua’s years, as he remarks “Crooks always come undone, always, one way or another,” which may as well be the intro to Kubrick’s meticulously unraveling perfect heist movie THE KILLING (1956).  He soon realizes why his mother kept him away from her family.  What we witness is a slow changing of the mood, where the arrogant confidence of the boys is replaced by the foul play of revengeful police work, where the police don’t play by the rules any more than the criminals do, which leads to small cracks in the armor, the first evidence of tiny quirks or idiosyncrasies, as behavior slowly becomes more erratic until eventually, for some, the blood begins to boil.  Innocently enough, Joshua finds a high school girlfriend, Nicole (Laura Wheelwright), whose family provides him a safe haven and a meal from time to time.  Bringing her home to the boys starts one of the best sequences in the film, as they’re simply sitting around on the couch to Air Supply’s “All Out of Love” (Air Supply - All Out Of Love) playing on the television, which perfectly describes the world spinning out of control around them, especially when Nicole is under the constant gaze of Uncle Pope (Ben Mendelsohn), the most sociopathic of the uncles, a man in hiding from the cops whose grasp of reality demands that the world must submit to him.  Next to him, the rest of the family could be considered ideal neighbors, as they keep their illicit drug activity strictly indoors.  But boys will be boys, and like a pack of wild dogs, eventually they turn on each other.  This film is about how it’s impossible to remain out of their grasp, despite Joshua’s best efforts to remain neutral, as evidenced by the use of Jimmy Cliff’s “Sitting in Limbo” (Jimmy Cliff - Sitting In Limbo), as throughout, inert and silent, always under watchful eyes, he appears to be just a kid.  But one of the police captains (Guy Pearce) takes a special interest in Joshua, trying to become a father figure, trying to build his trust, all of which just pisses off his intemperate uncles even more.    

While it’s an unusual story about an unforgiving world, a pup growing up raised by a pack of wolves, Michôd’s ballsy and stylishly inventive way of telling the story adds a remarkable intensity throughout, as from the very start he pulls you into this world where it appears there’s no way out, slowly becoming more psychologically brutal, edited with a near perfect precision, using an exquisitely eerie sound design from Sam Petty, ominous electronic music from Antony Partos, slow-motion montages and a constantly moving camera from cinematographer Adam Arkapaw that seems to creep around the interior rooms wherever it goes, sometimes appearing as if out of nowhere, building up an extremely taut atmosphere of suspense, never knowing what monster will jump out of the dark.  It’s a disturbing film where everything we see falls under a cloud of dread and anxiety, where we can feel the nightmarish tension in the air, even as we are witness to moments of extreme horror.  They are not played out for graphic display, but are shown as it is, human beings capable of the most coldly calculated behavior, where the tension is ratcheted up to a fever pitch.  The deglamorized portrayal of Joshua’s family is nothing less than bone chilling, but it’s Joshua’s mood that needs to find a balance, that teeter totters between the protection of the police, as represented by Pearce, who ignores or is in denial over the murderous provocation within his own department, or the protection of his family, which is like sending a lamb into the lion’s den.  Either way, nothing appears safe.  But this is a keenly observant film that allows the initially apathetic Joshua the ability to show good instincts and make smart decisions, so as we follow his every move, we get into the constantly probing mindset of a teenage kid in desperate trouble.  Briskly paced, until the final moments, the audience never has a clear idea what’s going to happen other than it likely won’t be good.  There’s an everpresent dour tone, but also random moments of absurdity and humor, which when added to the menacing atmosphere of suspense make this an intensely appealing, yet utterly creepy film experience. 

The Immigrant

THE IMMIGRANT          B     
USA  (120 mi)  2013  ‘Scope  d:  James Gray 

What led the American director to this subject matter is open to question, the last big wave of European immigration, which is given the epic, grandiose treatment, co-written by the director himself along with the late Richard Menello, reportedly with Marion Cotillard in mind, where it's the overwrought writing that is the weakest link in this picture.  Gray met the actress over dinner with her husband Guillaume Canet, claiming he had never seen her in anything before, but was instantly drawn to her, “I thought she had a great face, and not just physically beautiful because she is, but a haunted quality, almost like a silent film actress.  I’ve talked about this, but she reminded me of Maria Falconetti in the Carl Theodor Dreyer film THE PASSION OF JOAN OF ARC (1928), able to convey depth of emotion without dialogue specifically.  I watched every film of hers I could get my hands on.  And then I knew I had to write something for her.  So that’s the genesis of this thing. I wrote the movie for her and Joaquin Phoenix, and if they hadn’t wanted to do the movie, I’m not sure I would have made it.”  Taking a turn from his earlier contemporary work dominated by male characters, Gray gets the idea to craft a historical period drama set in 1912 New York City, including the arrival at Ellis Island, the gateway for millions into America (which shut down shortly afterwards in 1924, allowing only refugees afterwards), where he attempts to recreate the emotional and moral price of the immigrant experience as seen through the eyes of a female protagonist alone in America, separated from her family, where she’s forced to navigate her way through murky waters.  Guided by his own family’s history (it’s their photo in the locket), the movie is largely based on the experiences of the director’s grandparents who were Russian immigrants that came through Ellis Island in 1923, a historical period that saw a large influx of Italian immigrants, as this is the era of Sacco and Vanzetti (2006) and the First Red Scare of 1919-20, when the nation was caught up in a witch hunt hysteria of rampant racism and xenophobia.  In this setting, shot onsite, Marian Cotillard is Ewa Cybulska, seen arriving at Ellis Island with her sister Magda (Angela Sarafyan), Polish immigrants who share a similar dream of making a new life in America.  Things go badly from the start, however, as Magda is instantly pulled out of the line and quarantined with a lung disease (later diagnosed as tuberculosis), leaving Ewa to fend for herself, promising she’ll find her sister, though she is separated as well and placed into a line where she’ll be sent right back to Europe, as written reports from the ship during the crossing suggest she “may be a woman of bad morals.”  Hovering around the proceedings is the strange figure of Bruno Weiss (Joaquin Phoenix), a man who seems to prey on the misfortunes of others, as he notices Ewa in line and bribes an official to admit her into his custody.  The bustling street life, where Gray recreates the crowded streets of the tenement-era Lower East Side in the Bronx, bathed in sepia tones by cinematographer Darius Khondji, recall similar scenes from Francis Ford Coppola’s THE GODFATHER:  PART II (1974).

Bruno brings her back into his home in a largely Jewish neighborhood, where his use of Yiddish commands a certain respect, as people don’t bother him, where we soon learn he runs a small burlesque strip theater that is a front for a whorehouse run by the daunting figure of his boss, Rosie (Elena Solovey).  Immediately the audience gets a sense of his moral manipulation, where he pretends to treat her kindly and with respect while forcing her into the compromising position of having no other choice.  Bruno’s method of bribery is the only hope to get Magda (confined to the hospital) released, but that requires a large sum of money, while Ewa remains penniless.  Cast as the Statue of Liberty in his Prohibition era theater, she is the subject of whistles and catcalls, becoming one of his most popular acts, even as she’s seen recoiling at being touched, where her initiation into the business is particularly degrading, where Cotillard plays the part with excessive fragility and innocence, reminiscent of Björk’s overwrought performance in Lars von Trier’s DANCER IN THE DARK (2000), both forced into insufferable misery, where economic circumstances lead them into the depths of human depravity and despair.  If there is anything particularly troubling about this picture, it is this incessant tone of torment and suffering, where the entire film is cast in a cloud of neverending gloom, where most of it feels like a funeral dirge.  Lacking the lyrical poeticism of Bresson’s Mouchette (1967), one of his bleakest films, Gray elevates the suffering of unappreciated and misunderstood women, using the classic Hollywood-style soap opera treatment of overly manipulative melodramas by Barbara Stanwyck in STELLA DALLAS (1937) or Greta Garbo in CAMILLE (1937), where there’s also an element of Maria Falconetti’s saintly masochism, made worse by the wretchedness of sexual servitude.  Ewa escapes to her aunt and uncle, relieved, as she was told by immigration authorities that their address was invalid, where there is a moment where she can breathe again, only to be turned back over to officials for deportation back to Poland, as her uncle runs a “legitimate business” and refuses to be stained by her “morals” accusations.  While awaiting departure, one of the strangest developments in the entire film is an entertainment sequence for detainees at Ellis Island, which includes no less than Italian tenor Enrico Caruso singing Puccini, and Orlando the Magician (Jeremy Renner) doing a levitation act, both given a near mythical context to reinforce the idea of America as a land of dreams and unimagined opportunities. 

It’s not Orlando, who attempts to befriend her, however, but Bruno who returns to spare Ewa from deportation, again springing a bribe for her release, but only under the pretext that she’ll work for him as a prostitute on a 50/50 basis.  While Orlando promises her hope, it’s Bruno that deals in the harsh aspects of reality, making the necessary connections by exploiting women for money, pitting the two men against one another as rivals in love, which seems overly ridiculous as Ewa can be obtained by any man for a price.  This love triangle is reminiscent of Gelsomina’s fate in Fellini’s LA STRADA (1954) or Mieze in Fassbinder’s BERLIN ALEXANDERPLATZ (1980), thoroughly mistreated women (prostitutes) who are desperate to find a way out of their economic and emotional strangleholds.  While there’s plenty that feels overbearing and lacks any realistic connection to the audience, where the American dream of freedom is bathed in a baptism of soul crushing suffering, what distinguishes this film is Ewa’s unwavering hold on her own self worth, her continuing devotion to her sister, and her faith in God, where she says in Polish “Nie jestem niczym (I am not nothing),” becoming a prominent theme echoed later in the film.  Even as her lowly position moves from bad to worse, where she is continuously debased by her mortal sins, egged on by Bruno who cheerfully exclaims, “You helped your sister today!” in the end she only ends up thoroughly hating herself.  Easily the most poignant scene of the film takes place in an immense Catholic church where Ewa offers a prayer and a full-blown confession to a priest, confessing her “many, many sins,” where she asks “Is it a sin to want to survive when I have done so many bad things?”  While acknowledging being raped on passage, where people were starving without food or water, her thoughts are heart wrenching as she longs for absolution, yet remains convinced, despite the redemptive power of her faith, that her sins have condemned her to eternal damnation.  While Bruno is a Jewish street kid, reminded of his place by the police who beat him, call him racial slurs, and steal his money, with no illusions about the necessity of hard work, Ewa’s compassionate nature contrasts his seeming indifference, where the film combines the Catholic and Jewish concepts of sin and spiritual salvation, using Ewa’s arduous journey as a life of exile and suffering, where she’s seen as a mythic innocent, despite her sins, recalling the meadows back home in a surprisingly lyrical dream sequence.  It’s Bruno—pimp, ultimate betrayer and manipulator—that delivers an epic notion of self-loathing in a tortuous monologue where he’s so disgusted with himself that he literally “feels” as if he’s already condemned to damnation, yet it’s Ewa who tenderly consoles him, the repugnant man who may have condemned her to the same fate.  In the finale, the two share separate fates, shown in a split-screen image captured in the same shot, where the notion of forgiveness remains an unanswered question, as Ewa’s thoughts of transcendence remain at odds in a coldly indifferent and uncaring world, but one hopes she may yet reach a better place.   

Of Note:  
Enrico Caruso, along with Rudy Vallee, Jimmy Durante, Bob Hope, and Lionel Hampton and his orchestra, among others, all performed at Ellis Island as one of the steps along their world tour that included entertaining U.S. military troops.  Also, Cotillard had to memorize twenty pages of Polish dialogue, while Maja Wampuszyc, who played her nervous aunt in the film, taught the actress how to speak Polish.

Don't Look Now

DON’T LOOK NOW        A-         
Great Britain  Italy  (110 mi)  1973  d:  Nicolas Roeg

A film that thrives on what’s happening under the surface, a mood of disaffected emotions, a series of endless searches, missed connections, various mediums, overlapping dialogue that sometimes fades out altogether, and deteriorating ancient relics that need restoration that may as well stand for the declining morals and deteriorating importance of the Catholic Church.  Adapted from a Daphne du Maurier short story from her book Not After Midnight, 1971, who interestingly wrote a letter to Roeg congratulating him on making such a strong adaptation of her story, this film was released in the same year as THE EXORCIST (1973), received some notoriety as an art film, for the sex scenes between Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie who were offscreen lovers at the time, and remains downright gloomy to watch, with its icy disconnected emotions captured in the back alleys and canals and dark shadows under the bridges of Venice during winter.  The surface detail shot by Anthony Richmond as well as the director, also the over-the-top musical score by Pino Donnagio accentuates the unsettled psychological mood that only grows more macabre by the film’s end.  

Nicolas Roeg trained for twenty-three years in the British Film Industry before getting a shot as a director, starting out as an editing apprentice and camera operator for twelve years before getting the chance to work under infamous British director David Lean on the second unit photography for LAWRENCE OF ARABIA (1962), eventually becoming the lead cinematographer on Roger Corman’s THE MASQUE OF THE RED DEATH (1964), François Truffaut’s FAHRENHEIT 451 (1966), John Schlesinger’s FAR FROM THE MADDENING CROWD (1967), and Richard Lester’s PETULIA (1968), before co-directing his first film at age 42, the legendary PERFORMANCE (1970) starring Mick Jagger in his film debut, amusingly voted best performance by a musician in a film by Film Comment in the September/October 2009 edition.  Roeg brought his own camerawork into Walkabout (1971), his first solo effort, a uniquely visualized, magnificently beautiful film.  Roeg’s films characteristically are beautifully filmed, where each shot displays a mastery of composition, framing, focus, and color qualities, breaking free from conventional film narration, exhibiting an experimental use of editing, creating an impressionistic film mosaic told out of time, challenging the viewer to understand the work as a whole, even as the fragmented parts may be puzzling to comprehend, heavily influencing modern era directors such as Christopher Nolan, Francois Ozon, Danny Boyle, and Steven Soderbergh.   

Innocently enough, the film begins with raindrops on a lake, showing the reflection of Christine (Sharon Williams), a little girl wearing a bright red raincoat playing around the water’s edge on a giant estate while her parents, art restorer John Baxter (Donald Sutherland) and his wife Laura (Julie Christie), sit in the warm comfort of their home oblivious to what’s happening outside, until suddenly and unexpectedly John races outside without any warning and discovers Christine’s body too late, as she has already drowned.  The scene shifts to Venice where the couple hopes a change of scenery will lift their grief-stricken spirits, where John is working on restoring a church, to the complete indifference of the Bishop.  Venice with its waterways is certainly an interesting choice to recover from the shock of a drowning, where it’s used as a location of eroticism and violence, while another is Sutherland’s impeccable unsubtitled Italian, which is prominently featured throughout, a subtle yet effective device to keep the audience in the dark.  Adding to this curious mixture, Laura meets two inseparable sisters, one of whom is a blind psychic that communicates with the dead, claiming their child is trying to contact them and warn them of imminent danger, a complete stranger accurately describing her physical appearance, which sends Laura in a swoon. 

John thinks these women with their séances are a bit daft and refuses to take them seriously, even after they are issued a warning that something terrible is about to happen to them, while simultaneously there are reports of recent serial killings in Venice, which doesn’t stop them from having a passionate sexual experience, a curious mingling of sex and violence.  The psychic mentions that John is a seer himself, though he may not yet understand his gift.  A call in the middle of the morning conveys the news that their son has had an accident in his school in England.  Laura takes the first flight back to England, but later that same morning, John sees her with the two sisters in a barge on the canals in what appears to be a funeral procession, but can’t understand why he hasn’t heard from her.  With news of a serial killer on the loose and his wife missing, he makes a police report implicating the sisters.  But just as baffling, he later receives a call from his wife in England reporting that their son is fine, which leaves John in a state of flux, as he could have sworn what he saw was real, yet what he mistakenly thought was the present may have been a vision of the future, a premonition of events yet to come, opening the floodgates for strange and mysterious occurrences that resemble the occult.    

From that point on, things appear out of a different supernatural dimension, where red deliriously begins to overwhelm the color palette, as John catches glimpses of a young child running around wearing his daughter’s red raincoat.  He politely walks the blind seer home from the police station where she was being interrogated, at John’s request, inexplicably abandoned by her other sister, setting in motion an investigation of an event that apparently never took place.  When the seer gets agitated, telling John he must leave Venice immediately, John leaves, but the psychic screams for him to come back as he disappears into the shadows outdoors, out of which Laura appears instead.  John catches a glimpse of the red raincoat, believing now this is the ghost of his missing child, and follows the trail up and down the dark walkways which remain otherwise eerily empty.  Oddly resembling a hallucination dream sequence drenched in a wafting fog, the murky atmosphere matches the deteriorating stability of John’s state of mind.  What happens next is shocking, one of cinema’s most terrifying climaxes, like the increasing waves of dread and anxiety in Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958), suddenly reaching a level of surreal visual hysteria that predates David Lynch, ending the film with a “life flashing before your eyes” sequence, as the brilliantly edited, disconnected pieces finally start to make sense in this collapsing world of psychological terror. 

Wetlands (Feuchtgebiete)

WETLANDS (Feuchtgebiete)     C-       
Germany  (105 mi)  2013  d:  David Wnendt

Not for the meek or timid.  Taking a page from many recent films that objectify women’s bodies, viewed as demeaning from a male view, like Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s Don Jon (2013), where Scarlett Johansson plays the male fantasy version of a voluptuous tease, Abdellatif Kechiche’s Black Venus (Vénus noire) (2010), a wretchedly abusive early 19th century historical example of European racism, and even to some extent his sexually exploitive lesbian film Blue Is the Warmest Color (La Vie d'Adèle, Chapitres 1 et 2) (2013), especially as seen under a male eye, but then it becomes empowering by female directors, like Hager Ban-Asher’s The Slut (Hanotenet) (2011), where the director herself plays the lead character, or Julia Leigh’s Sleeping Beauty (2011), where a woman becomes a gorgeous plaything, a look but don’t penetrate porcelain doll, where liberation is achieved by defying the male stereotype.  Jonathan Glazer takes a stab in Under the Skin (2013), again using Scarlett Johansson, turning an extraterrestrial perspective into a feminist view of female objectification, where women are judged and valued through surface artificiality, and what’s inside hardly matters.  David Wnendt is a German director who has for the most part created a lesbian fantasy, where a young anal-obsessed woman seeks liberation by freeing up her body to perform any gross and vulgar task she can imagine, testing the limits of bad taste right from the outset, notably the opening half-hour, and then plunging ever deeper into a full-blown exploration of anal fantasies.  What separates this from the rest is the whimsically comic view that a woman’s body is meant to be shared as often, and in as many ways, as possible, where it has a blaring punk music soundtrack that growls for attention, pushing the envelope of what’s deemed acceptable, and then going farther into repugnant territory.

Carla Juri is our bad girl Helen (age 27 when she made the film, though she’s perceived as a teenager), initially seen as a little 8-year old girl (Clara Wunsch) receiving instructions on how not to trust anybody, including her own mother (who allows her to jump into her arms from a ledge and then intentionally fails to catch her, hoping this memory of a painful injury will provide fruitful results), but also proper instructions from her mother (Meret Becker) on how to clean and maintain proper hygiene for her private parts, as her worst nightmare is having an accident and being discovered with unclean underwear.  As a result of her mother’s fanatical obsessions, Helen as a young adult has been ingrained with a hyper interest in her female orifices, where the title of the film refers to her vaginal region, where one of her favorite pastimes is rubbing it on every known filthy object imaginable, seen in the opening scene of the film cleaning an indescribably filthy toilet seat until it is spotlessly clean.  Due to her mother’s feverishly persistent cleaning habits, Helen likes to go a good week or so without cleaning, where the overwhelming stench from her pubic region is perhaps what she’s most proud of in herself.  While the idea of accepting yourself, gross and all, is well meaning, the film goes to great lengths to create nauseatingly uncomfortable images, a bit like Kirby Dick’s SICK:  THE LIFE & DEATH OF BOB FLANAGAN, SUPERMASOCHIST (1997), which was known to make viewers pass out in the audience.  Whether or not one agrees with the film’s premise is not the issue, as it discovers new heights in sexual material as comical farce, where it simply grows deliriously ridiculous, yet like any bad car accident, it’s hard for many people to look away, as the tendency is to be curious about outrageous displays of colossal disasters happening before our eyes. 

After awhile this may grow repetitive, where the viewers may be asking themselves how far they really want to go with this, as it can get grotesque after awhile even as it attempts to maintain a tone of silly fun.  It is somewhat reminiscent of Marina de Van’s IN MY SKIN (2002), which is an admittedly squeamish film of not only self-mutilation, but self-cannibalism as well, where the degree of excess is mind-boggling, yet de Van’s film plays as an arthouse horror film, while Wnendt’s over-the-top exaggeration is meant to be comical throughout, where Helen is no shrinking violet, but extremely comfortable in her own skin.  She winds up in the hospital under particularly inauspicious circumstances, and immediately takes to one of the nursing staff, Robin (Christoph Letkowski), always exposing herself, but also asking for his help in getting her separated parents back together, choreographing their visits so they would bump into each other.  In this way, it’s a good-natured comical farce, a fantasy of what the world would be like if people could simply accept one another and be happy with themselves.  Helen’s partner in crime is her girlfriend Corinna (Marlen Kruse), where they go through teenage experimentation together, each showing a fearless resolve to overcome all inhibitions, where Corinna’s attempt to please her punk drummer boyfriend is one for the ages.  Adapted from a Charlotte Roche novel, one would think this is unfilmable, or better yet, should never be filmed, where there’s a pizza sequence that will probably leave the audience wishing it had never been filmed, as one hopes no one really gets the idea, but the film is apparently very popular in Germany where they don’t have sexual phobias and taboos like the more puritanical USA.  The one thing going for the film is its overall snarky tone of subversiveness, like the raw and graphic sexual imagery found in underground comics, and some humorous use of music, but Helen’s naïve notion of happiness is fairly sweet and innocent, and certainly far from deviant.  You’d think she may outgrow many of the most disgusting habits once she gets them out of her system, where it’s not the exploitive imagery, but mostly her candy-colored, light and cheerful attitude that carries the film.