Surviving the Artifice

From the Argentine EL METODO to the Hollywoodian THE DEVIL WEARS PRADA, passing through the French LE COUPERET, contemporary cinema seems to be getting more and more interested in business and the world of great corporations.

As different as their approach may be, however, there is a common theme in all of them: the more the characters develop and dive in this universe, the more they lose their souls and humanity. What these films seems to want to tell us is that, to be successful in the world of business, one must leave behind feelings such as compassion, modesty and affection.

YELLA (Germany) is not an exception in its portrait of a young woman who looks for a turn in her career after the end of a troubled relationship. Yella, the main character, leaves her ex-husband and her father behind in search of a job in the Western part of Germany (and this migration of the character from Eastern to Western Germany can’t help but to bring a political tone to the film). When she discovers that her promised job no longer exists, Yella ends up finding refuge in Philipp, an executive who specializes in negotiating high-risk loans.

Philipp hires Yella as his assistant, teaching her the tricks of the trade and how to find the client’s weak point (responsible for one of the few moments of comic relief in this otherwise very tense film). The more Yella gets involved with Philipp and their business, the more she gets professional and, consequently, dehumanized.

The daily life of these characters, as portrayed by director Christian Petzold, is composed basically of offices, hotel rooms and long car trips. A very impersonal and purely functional universe, where everything is build around business. Even personal relationships are dealt with as in a negotiation, with calculated words and lots of corporal language.

But there is also an obscure side to this story, something strange in the air that is always present thanks to the great use of sound and Nina Hoss’ performance, always kind of absent and dislocated from her surroundings. We know there is something else going on, but we don’t know exactly what, which rises the tension during projection and transforms what would be a film on the business universe in a kind of inexplicable suspense.

We discover that YELLA is build on an artifice, an information omitted to the viewer until the end. However, in contrast to so many other films that make use of similar expedients, Petzold manages to sustain his film beyond and despite this artifice, thanks to his economic but precise direction and cinematography and to the remarkable performance by Nina Hoss. That way, the final turning point ends up being almost a superfluous concession to this otherwise quite intriguing film.

Leonardo Mecchi

© Berlinale Talent Campus 2007