By JOE QUEENAN

In the recent German film “Yella a young accountant survives a car crash engineered by her stalker ex-husband, leaves town, meets a mysterious private equity fund executive and lands a job as his assistant. Initially hired because of her command of spreadsheets , Yella, the accountant, soon becomes a full partner in her employer’s scheme to extort money from financially imperiled start-up companies and start a new life.
To those of us who harbor a secret passion for high-quality films about bookkeepers, certified public accountants, auditors and tax officials, the release of “Yella is a very exciting moment in the history of the genre. This is not only because “Yella,” unlike most accounting movies, does not belittle practitioners of the trade , but because the film is the fourth European release in the past decade to portray accountants as compelling characters.
The other entries are “The Dinner Game and “The Closet, brilliant comedies by Francis Veber, and Patrice Leconte’s sweet little romance “Intimate Strangers.
That accountancy should be considered an appropriate subject for a serious film marks a sharp break with tradition. Starting with the original “Producers (1968), in which Gene Wilder plays a neurotic, fearful accountant, and straight through “Ghostbusters, “Hitch,” and “Exotica,” accountants have mostly been portrayed as geeks and losers.
Even exceptions - Charles Grodin as a finicky accountant who defrauds the mob in “Midnight Run,” Danny Glover as a patrician accountant in “The Royal Tenenbaums - still use the profession as a joke.
In most American films , the accountant is usually portrayed as a goof, a slob or a jerk. In Brian de Palma’s “Untouchables, Charles Martin Smith plays a tiny, pipe-smoking, bespectacled treasury agent who dreams up the idea of arresting Al Capone for tax evasion. Just before his demise, he tells a fellow official, the virile young Andy Garcia, that his new shotgun-toting life is “much more diverting than accounting.”
What makes the flurry of European films so exciting is that accountancy is central to the movie’s drama. When Mr. Veber made “The Dinner Game in 1998, he cast Jacques Villeret as a bumbling Finance Ministry technocrat who assembles matchstick models of the Eiffel Tower and the Arc de Triomphe in his spare time. Though the civil servant ultimately prevails , the movie adheres to the tired theme of making fun of the accountant.
But by the time the same director made “The Closet” three years later, he no longer treated accountancy as a joke. In this delicious bonbon Daniel Auteuil plays a low-key accountant who initially gets fired for being boring and expendable, then wins his job back by pretending to be gay. By the end the audience realizes that accountants can be cunning, daring and yes, even seductive.
One might argue that because the accountant in “The Closet is a liar, the one in “Yella is a con artist, the one in “The Dinner Game is a klutz, and the one in “Intimate Strangers is a phony (and may not even be an accountant), none of these films does much for the image of the profession. That may be true, but we enjoy seeing charismatic actors playing accountants in classy European movies. That doesn’t mean we’d want them doing our taxes.