Yella
Like many films that have come out of Germany in recent years, Yella is concerned with coming to terms with the past and adjusting to the present.
Yella (Nina Hoss) is a reserved yet ambitious woman who is determined to leave behind her old life in a rather demoralising eastern German town, where her possessive ex-husband (Hinnerk Schönemann) trawls the streets in search of her, unable to accept that she no longer loves him. Partly to escape him, she accepts an accountancy job in Hamburg, but nothing is quite as it seems. After a brutal parting shot with her husband, Yella legs it to the train, sodden and dishevelled. She arrives at her new workplace the next day to find that her lecherous boss (Michael Wittenborn) has been given the sack, leaving her jobless, alone and haunted by the past.
But help is at hand in the form of Philipp (Devid Striesow), a venture capitalist who decides he could make good use of Yella’s talent for spreadsheets and corporate boardrooms. Before a business meeting, Philipp passes on some tricks of the trade - when to gaze at the spreadsheet, when to gaze at the would-be client, and when to lean over and whisper in his ear - but it is Yella who holds the floor, boldly pointing out deceptions and false assets hidden buried between the spreadsheets.
The backdrop of anonymous business parks and motorway hotels brings an unnervingly oppressive tone to the whole film. Recurring themes and images suggest entrapment and lurking, unnamed danger. The isolated commercial outposts in which Yella and Philipp conduct their business, all glass and metal and endless corridors, contribute to a sense of unreality and become a kind of no-man’s land that mirrors Yella’s loneliness. The film is punctuated by eerie episodes when her ears ring with the sound of running water and the harsh shriek of a bird, and she seems to intuitively understand things about people. This strange phenomenon is explained only at the end of the film.
Yella’s business partner and new amour also possesses an uncanny ability to predict things about her that turn out to be true. Philipp sets a trap for her by giving her a larger sum of money to deposit than the bank will accept, and seeing if she will pocket the change. She almost does, until he stops her. At first angry at her deception, he soon sees her willingness to steal as a sign that she will cooperate with his fraudulent dealings.
The writer-director, Christian Petzold, occasionally punctuates the film’s quiet tension with apt and humorous observations about the bizarre corporate landscape, such as when Yella’s disgraced boss hails a taxi to take him to “Rue de Paris on the corner of Sydney Gardens.” The cosmopolitan sounding street names are incongruous with the surrounding landscape of drab concrete office buildings and lifeless shrubbery.
Hoss is terrific in the lead role, deliberately stilted and aloof, so that it’s unclear whether she’s hiding emotional trauma or simply sulking. Occasionally she’ll break out in a shy, knowing smile, intended more for herself than for anyone else. One of the pleasures of the film is trying to read her mind. Striesow and Schönemann as the male leads Philipp and Ben have an unsettling similarity in terms of physical appearance, and are both ruthless and obsessive in their own ways.
Petzold’s film is an excellently crafted, atmospheric thriller which offers a penetrating glimpse into the life of a woman, and society, ill at ease with her own past.
