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Yella (2007)

Director: Christian Petzold

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Movie review

From Time Out London

Scouring the morally abstruse hinterland of mergers, acquisitions and venture capitalism, this Teutonic nightmare from gifted ‘Berlin School’ writer-director Christian Petzold is a welcome addition to the current cycle of German films (alongside ‘Downfall’, ‘Good Bye Lenin!’ and ‘The Lives of Others’) which deal confidently and directly with the country’s turbulent recent history. Yella (played with a spectral simplicity by Nina Hoss) is a business-savvy divorcee based in the sleepy East German town of Wittenberge. Looking to make a clean break with her past, she accepts a job as an accountant for a company in Hanover, but tragedy strikes when her resentful ex-husband trys to kill her by careering his Land Rover into the Elbe. Managing to claw herself away from the wreckage, she eventually reaches her destination but discovers the job she was promised doesn’t exist. A chance meeting with crotchety loner Phillip leads to some lucrative freelance investment work and the couple roam the country crushing smaller companies with their superior business smarts.

As their professional relationship soon blossoms into love, Yella and Phillip become the business equivalent to Bonnie and Clyde with a laptop in place of a Tommy gun and stacks of accounting spreadsheets in place of bullets. But the drab, overcast landscapes are awash with supernatural forces which are constantly reminding Yella of a dark secret from her past. With its sardonic use of ultra-functional mise en scène redolent of Laurent Cantet’s ‘Time Out’ juxtaposed with random blurts of Lynchian aural dissonance (the repeated use of Julie Driscoll’s ‘Road to Cairo’ is especially ghostly), Petzold’s film is an expertly crafted thriller which offers a pessimistic, though deeply rewarding, glimpse of a society being haunted by its own past.

Author: David Jenkins

Time Out London Issue 1935: September 19-25

User reviews of this film

Technoguy said...

Posted on Feb 07 2008 16:03 We could have called this film 'Blue' as it takes place in a spectral cool world,awash with memories,flashbacks,phantoms,lakes.We are in the modern world of venture capital,but this itself is an unemotional unreal world of business parks and office buildings.Young woman leaves small town(Wittenburg) and ex-husband to make a new life.The job she is after in Hanover,disappears. In business hotel man makes pass of unimaginable corniness,yet he's her ticket out of her former life and away from her vengeful husband.On her way here her former husband drove her and himself off a Bridge into a river on their way to the railway station.She appears to crawl out of the river onto the embankment,he shortly after,they lie there exhausted, next to each other.Crows wake her and she sees the leaves of a tree blowing.She seems almost at one with the world. She gets up and walks away.Gets on her train that takes her to her destination.She gains a job as an accountant with a freelance investor and together they take on this world of freelance investment.He tries to make money by cheating for his own business venture,she acts as his psychic counterpart to undermine the assets of small companies with a superior know how.All the time her ex-partner seems to stalk her asking her to come back or give him money for his own business schemes.She seems unemotional,eerie.She falls in love with new man Phillip.Things go well until one of the business operators,drowns himself in the lake next to his house.This brings back associations,melts into another deja vu journey with Phillip over a Bridge.This film then reminds me of another story/film: Incident at Owl Creek.Following death by hanging a man seems to escape by swimming away upstream and leading a new life.We however find out that the greater majority of the story has taken place in a dream.The man did die: what we took as life was his mind hallucinating as he dropped into the river. At the end of Yella bodies lie on the riverbank.

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