FILMBRATS - REVIEWS

Yella is a small town girl trying to leave her roots for a big opportunity in the city. She’s been hired to work as an accountant at a large firm, miles away from everything. That means leaving her small town ex-boyfriend Ben behind, which he doesn’t take so well. He offers to drive her to the train station, but instead he decides to drive the car off a bridge. The resulting crash leaves them both unconscious, but eventually Yella gets up and is able to leave and miraculously still makes the train. However, when the job turns out to be a scam, Yella’s left broken and afraid. Just when she thinks nothing can go right, Philipp enters the picture with a new job and a way to escape Ben – who might be stalking her.

What starts out as a very bland film about an independent woman trying to make something of herself ends up being a lame, kind of boring bland film about a woman who becomes increasingly dependant on a virtual stranger. Hmmm…so what went wrong? There is potential there. The story of a woman trying to escape her former life and start over after a traumatic experience only to have her previous life come back to her, either imagined or real – that sounds good and interesting. And there is plenty of mystery surrounding the characters; many secrets could be revealed. However it just turns out that we stop caring IF they are revealed.

The biggest obstacle this film fails to climb (and pretty sure never attempts to climb) is the acting. It’s unbelievably stoic. Aside from the few and far between sequences when Yella (played by Nina Hoss) thinks Ben may be following her, she essentially sits there like a lump, sleepwalking through every scene. Is she really that unphazed by the car crash? I’ve been in a bad one, and let me tell you, you don’t just get up and run to your train. There’s one sequence where you think she may be going crazy as she flashbacks during a business meeting, but again we get the Buster Keaton stone face and we aren’t nearly so lucky as to have the film take that turn.

The only thing really going for the movie is that it somehow manages to make all the business and accounting talk seem real while remaining interesting. Who would have thought that balance sheets and projections could carry a scene? I guess when the directing is so basic and the pace is so slow moving, you take whatever you can get. Of course, tacking on a predictable ending doesn’t help things either. Maybe the movie should have been about Ben instead.

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