Yella

Review by Leo Robson | 17 Aug 2007
In Gus Van Sant's remake of Psycho, the detective Arbogast is visited by split-second images of a sheep and a dour-looking woman as he falls to his death. Yella, in Christian Petzold's film, somehow plumps for an even more mundane parting vision: an hour and a half of business meetings and a staid romance with an accountant. The film, then, presents a character who has more psychological investment in insurance policies and expense accounts than, say, the halcyon carelessness of youth or the erotic ecstasies of adolescence - hardly a scenario to get the heart racing.

Almost as soon as Yella is shown clambering ashore after her estranged husband crashes them into the Erbe -an obvious impossibility to all but the most slow-witted- she immediately continues apace with her burgeoning career in corporate finance - that is, when she isn't preoccupied with seeing things, or missing her old father in Wittenberg. Yella's dying dream dramatises her central living conflict. Emotional responsibilities tied her to the East; professional opportunities drew her to the West. This cultural limbo is symbolised in geographical terms by the film's choice of the East-to-West Erbe for Yella's death scene.

In her equivocations, as in her experience of drownings, her witnessing of apparitions, her infatuation with her father, and her longing for Wittenberg, Yella is clearly intended to provoke memories of Prince Hamlet, another protagonist in a psychological pickle. But Yella's predicament is explored without dramatic intensity and verbal intoxication - useful qualities when a film's key sequences are jargon-riddled exchanges in anonymous boardrooms.