YELLA - MOVIE [DVD] [2007]

Nina Hoss is Yella, a young East German woman who wants to leave both, her poor hometown and her husband. So she moves to Westgermany, starts to work for a private equity manager and begins a relationship with him. However, her husband keeps stalking her...The story is about a woman's dream which gets out of control. It shows how an East German woman tries to cope with West German reality. It is filmed in a cold and at the same time realistic, artistic and suspenseful way (reminded me a bit of Chabrol's films). The major characters are multifaceted and their motives cannot be easily pinned down. The acting is excellent (Nina Hoss won a Silver Bear on the Berlin Film Festival for her performance) and leaves room for interpretation. This film stands in the tradition of German 'author cinema'. It is not easy, mainstream entertainment, but if you are looking for something unusual and thought-provoking, this is your film. I certainly enjoyed it a lot.

Yella is about a young woman who leaves her small town to move to Hanover to work and make money. As the movie begins she is stalked by her ex-boyfriend with whom she ran a company that went down. We follow her to Hanover where she meets a man in the finance sector. More than that should not be said about the plot before watching it.The film creates a very cold and creepy atmosphere as almost no one is smiling. We see interiors of depersonalised spaces like offices, hotels and lounges, slick buildings and new cars. There is a tense feeling because money is at stake and people can obviously not be trusted. At the same time there is something dreamlike about certain scenes. I find Yella very thrilling psychologically speaking, cause the action is very limited. As a viewer I wondered about certain things all to the end, cause this film contains some mysteries. Also, the transfer of this AE DVD is very good. Recommended!

In his interview in the Special Features section on the DVD, director Christian Petzhold explains the origin of this film. It is based on a strong tradition of German legend and folklore. In such a story, the main character longs to escape from his or her stale and impoverished existence in a small town. In the same story, the person is always torn between staying and leaving.Thus what we see unfolding from the start is a tale of yearning and conflicting emotions. The director also takes the opportunity to take swipes at the world of private finance and the traditional style of German film-making.The film is beautifully made, while still being full of dramatic tension. The direction is very lean and tight, and hence Christian Petzhold is becoming a favourite director of mine. Nina Hoss plays her role with stunning intensity, placing herself at the very centre of the story, as a woman using all her strength and wit to fight against what life throws at her. The film is superbly edited to maintain the mystery right to the end, while emphasising its dreamlike quality.The Artificial Eye special features include a trailer, plus filmographies and interviews for both Pezthold and Hoss. I highly recommend 'Yella' and also the 2012 Petzhold/Hoss film 'Barbara'  Barbara [DVD ].

"Yella" is definitely one of the better foreign language films that I have seen recently. The acting is particularly impressive, especially Nina Hoss's performance as Yella Fichte , a young German woman, just separated from her husband and moving to Hanover in search of a new career and a new start.Yella is icily attractive and intelligent and she gains employment working as an assistant for a well off financier.However her husband persists in stalking her as her attraction to her new employer grows. It would be inappropriate to label this gripping film a thriller; it is more of a film about relationships and avarice than anything else. The ending when it arrives is quite surprising -I didn't see it coming at all- and in my opinion wasn't the best of conclusions to an absorbing film.

This is a film that keeps your attention all the time, not because it is action packed - it is not at all -but because there is a kind of eeriness and threat throughout. In some ways the film depicts the hum drum monotony of executive life and business on the road and nothing more, but the twist in the story is really memorable, particularly as it is hard to see a point in the film where the future twist becomes obvious, even once you know it. I find that very skillful and the fact that it stays in the mnd for so long after seeing the film is the sign of good storytelling.I think the amazon description of the film not as accurate as it could be as to me it implies something much faster moving and suggests the characters are 'winners' where in fact they are tragic losers.

In the final scene of the film, the so-called "near-death experience" from the opening section is repeated, this time in realistic detail. But what a let-down. It turns out that Yella has been dead all along and that the previous hour and a half of inexplicable melodrama is exactly that -- inexplicable melodrama. This is not, as some reviewers appear to feel, advanced German film-making at its most sophisticated: it is a cheap betrayal of the viewer's good faith for no better reason than the incompetence of the scriptwriter and the director. And it has nothing to do with a German film being "lost in translation." I watched the film in German. It would be irredeemably stupid in any lanaguage.