Yella (Germany 2007)

Nina Hoss as Yella

I missed Christian Petzold's appearance at the Bradford Film Festival earlier this year, so it was good to catch up with his latest release, Yella on DVD. Yella is an intriguing film that creates a metaphor about both a sense of East Germans looking for an escape to a better future and a sense of the empty and soulless capitalism of the West, represented here by the glass-walled offices rented by venture capital companies on the Autobahne outside major cities.

The striking Nina Hoss plays a young woman who leaves her abusive husband in the East seeking a new job on the other side of the Elbe. What she finds is a situation in which another version of her husband -- a more successful and organised venture capitalist -- properly appreciates her skills as an accountant. Or does she? The film has a twist. It was recommended to me as rather like Kim Ki-duk's 3-Iron and, surprisingly perhaps, I can see the connection. The twist will no doubt anger some audiences -- perhaps it will be thought obvious, perhaps it will be taken to be wilfully obscure. Either way, it works for me and I found the film to be a much more interesting account of East and West than the more hyped films such as The Lives of Others. Yella is beautifully filmed and carefully and intelligently directed. The DVD release by Artificial Eye (Region 2) has interviews with both Petzold and Hoss that are revealing of the methods used. I hope more of Petzold's films are released in the UK.