Yella
2007, directed by Christian Petzold
Shortly after plunging into the Elbe River in her estranged husband’s car, Yella experiences the first of her eerie quiet spells on the way to her hotel in Hannover. The spell is brief and uneventful except that she finds herself staring at a family of three by a green Jaguar in their driveway. Finally the wind ruffles a tree, a crow caws, the wife of the family returns her stare, and Yella walks away embarrassed. First-time viewers might not notice that this is the same family Yella will blackmail toward the end, prompting the husband, Dr. Gunthen, to drown himself. The episode has something of The Appointment in Samarra to it, because when she meets the family again only days later, their house is in Dessau, about 180 km to the east. Even the car’s license plate has changed.
The counterpart to Death in this sequence is Yella, already on the verge of death herself. As in Yella‘s cinematic model Carnival of Souls, she does not survive the submerged car, and the subsequent events can be taken as her imagination racing while she drowns. Her quiet spells (broken here by crows instead of the cardinals in Carnival of Souls) simulate the experience of a drowning person periodically gasping at the surface. To the Gunthen family she’s a Grim Reaper, not only calling from the realm of the dead, but bringing death to them. Seeing Yella the second time, Mrs. Gunthen instinctively tells her to “Go away!”
These encounters, though, are not real after all. Neither is Yella’s partnership with Philipp, nor her disappointing arrival in Hannover to find herself jobless, the man who hired her having just been fired himself. The challenge of Yella is to piece together what we can of the reality behind these imagined events. To start with, Yella usually gives the impression of being a victim, but her deadly role in the Gunthen household complicates that picture.
After finding herself stranded in Hannover, Yella falls by chance into a partnership with Philipp, a venture capital agent who comes to rely on Yella’s skill at zeroing in on the weaknesses in a company’s balance sheets. Philipp is a hard negotiator, but Yella discovers that he’s cheating his boss, presumably skimming some of the difference when he wins a higher than expected share of the target’s equity. Independent of his own firm, he’s closing in on a small Irish company whose drill technology he foresees exploiting for massive profit. When Philipp is fired, Yella takes it on herself to complete his ambition by extorting the needed 200,000 euros from Dr. Gunthen, threatening to alert an American company to his intended patent infringement, but her plan backfires with the man’s suicide.
The blackmail effort is not Yella’s first attempted crime. Philipp asks her to deposit two sums of cash at a bank teller, but he tests her by including a 25,000 euro surplus, which she nearly mails to her husband when Philipp catches her. He’s momentarily angered, but he lets it go, possibly glad on some level to meet someone equally unscrupulous. What’s odd is that after the deposit, Yella appears for five seconds through a surveillance camera. In a normal movie this would hint at some future use as evidence, but it never comes into play here. Instead it’s simply the first strong signal of Yella’s guilt.
There’s another odd detail in that scene. Before the bank, Philipp had dropped Yella off by a steel arch bridge like the one where she had plunged into the Elbe. As we find out, the arc of her story matches her descent into the river, and Yella’s business projects also follow a downward trajectory, from airports and airplanes (with Ben and Alpha Wings) to cars and batteries (Philipp’s meetings) to oil drilling. Each stage points lower than the last, as if Yella is getting dragged down. When a second, nearly identical arch bridge prefaces her first crime, it bolsters the sense that Yella is sinking under a guilty conscience. It’s hard to believe, though, that the film means to demonize Yella, so we must ask where the real guilt lies.
On their drive to Dessau, Yella takes Philipp on a detour to Wittenberge, her hometown, where they get into a spat. They reconcile near the fatal bridge, and Philipp confesses his fear of meeting Yella’s father:
“It always starts in: ‘Do you enjoy your work?’ Or, ‘What do you earn, is there a future in it?’ ‘Where and how do you want to live? A house with garage and a green Jaguar and kids in the suburbs?’ Try to understand, that’s just what I don’t want. That doesn’t interest me.”
He doesn’t seem to realize that he’s just described the Gunthen family almost exactly, with their child, comfortable house, and green Jaguar. His speech may sound anti-materialistic until his real motive emerges a moment later – he wants much more than what the Gunthens have. His scheme with the drilling rigs would make him fantastically rich, and Yella decides to go along for the ride.
In Carnival of Souls the act of drowning was a metaphor for the difficulty of navigating a world that lets men have their way with women. In Yella it’s a metaphor for a life governed by competition in modern capitalism. The unspoken rule here is that doing well necessitates pushing someone else underwater. It’s significant that not only does Dr. Gunthen also die by drowning, but that Yella immediately asks whether there’s water behind his house when she comes looking for him. His waterlogged ghost had just appeared to her in an office meeting, so she has reason to suspect drowning, but the same metaphor also governs both of them, and Yella knows it.
As in Carnival of Souls there are surplus allusions to water throughout the story. The film opens with Yella crossing a floodplain on a homebound train. When she first encounters Philipp, a blue wave pops up in his laptop screensaver. Yella’s name is an anagram of Leyla, the protagonist of Petzold’s Toter Mann (2001), but it also sounds like the German word for wave, “Welle”. Her second quiet spell is triggered by a fallen glass of water at a business meeting. These hints of drowning are not inserted for spooky effect; but remind us of an unseen reality behind the visible events… a hidden reality that has a counterpart in our own economic lives.
Yella is a tragedy, but it grants its protagonist the redemption of insight in her final moments. As she imagines how her life might unfold after escaping from the sinking car, there’s no telling how accurate the train of events may be, but at least she perceives the direction her life is pushing her toward. She imagines a man much like her husband: blond, handsome, enterprising, gray suit, red car, fond of listening to “The Road to Cairo” – but he proves desperate and fraudulent, also like Ben. When Ben comes into her hotel room offering the modest life she always wanted, it’s evident that his ambition had once exceeded propriety, just like Philipp with his plan to revolutionize oil drilling.
Ben’s offer of concession reveals that Yella had once preferred an ordinary life, but more recently she left Ben when he was ruined, and her new job in the West is a symbolic step up for someone from the relatively depressed East. When she tells Philipp she’s going shopping, then instead visits the Gunthen house, she’s embraced the competitive ambition of her husband and his double. The fact that she recognizes the Gunthens in Hannover, and that she envisions them there at all, so far from their actual home, hints at a greater reality. It’s likely she hurt someone in a similar way during her dealings with Ben.
Yella is a curiously ambivalent character, capable of both modesty and excess, haunted by ghostly echoes of her life yet haunting others in return, prone to honesty yet capable of deception and manipulation. In short, she’s like so many innately decent people trying to get by in a corrupt economy, trying to do well but sucked into doing harm. Certainly she aims for immodest wealth toward the end, but that’s part of the film’s point. In an unsustainably competitive economy, the desire for wealth is not as simple as mere greed. For many it’s the only way to achieve a sense of security. Yella seems to want security above all… she runs from Ben into the safety of Philipp’s arms, and she seems to appreciate that Philipp is like her father, smiling at him when he peels an orange the same way.
In a story with so many echoes and repetitions, the saddest recurrence is at the end. The first time Ben steers the car off the bridge, she tries to grab the wheel away. At the end she doesn’t even reach for the wheel, and he steers into the river unimpeded. It’s as if, having understood how her world operates, she can envision no way to live securely without guilt, and she resigns herself to drowning.
CONNECTIONS:
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari – Unreliably narrated tale framed by reality at both ends with subtle insinuations of guilt
L’eclisse – Woman breaks up with her lover then finds a less possessive new lover in the arena of finance; car submerged in water; shots of a tree canopy from below
Carnival of Souls – Story of a woman’s new job framed by a car plunging off a bridge; episodes of muffled detachment; drowning as a metaphor
Veronika Voss – Critique of the cruelty of capitalism in modern Germany
LIST OF REPETITIONS:
- Ben listens to “The Road to Cairo”, wears a dark gray suit, drives a red Range Rover; Philipp does the same, except his car is an Audi
- Yella’s father peels an orange with a knife; Philipp peels an orange the same way
- Sonic boom when Ben picks Yella up from home; loud noise in the air when he pickes Yella up physically outside her hotel
- Ben takes Yella on an unwanted detour across the river; Yella takes Philipp on an unwanted detour to Wittenberge
- Ben drives his car off the bridge, and Yella resists; he does it again, and she doesn’t resist
- Gunthen family at home in Hannover with an H license plate; in Dessau with a DE license plate
- Yella gives Schmitt-Ott his portfolio in the car, and he hints that someone took part of it; Yella returns Philipp’s money in the car, and he discovers her intention to take it
- Philipp enters Yella’s hotel room when she leaves the door open; Yella enters Philipps when he does the same
- Philipp instructs Yella to whisper to him when he strikes a broker pose; businessmen across the table go through the same motions
- Ben visits Yella in Hannover twice
- Ben appears in Yella’s hotel room looking wet; Dr. Gunthen appears in the office looking drowned
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS:
The anagram of Leyla, the similarity of Philipp’s suit and car to Ben’s, and the connection to L’eclisse were first noted by Rüdiger Suchsland in the following German-language review: https://www.artechock.de/film/text/kritik/y/yella.htm