As Sissi lies pinned beneath the truck that has hit her, we hear the breath leaking out of her: Tykwer turns the sound up high so that her labored breathing is all we can hear -- it's a quiet that's close to deafening. A man whom we've seen but don't yet have a handle on, Bodo, slides under the truck to hide from some men who are pursuing him. When he realizes what's happening to Sissi, he acts with tenderness and urgency -- the same qualities that so often come to bear in lovemaking -- cutting a small hole in her throat with a penknife, allowing her to breathe, and removing the blood that's choking her by sucking it out himself.

The scene, which I could bring myself to watch with only one eye, is tense and gently paced at once. The sound of Sissi's blood gurgling through the straw that Bodo uses to perform this emergency tracheotomy encompassed a flood of feelings that I still can't quite untangle: wonder and awe at the slow, dreamy stillness that surrounds the saving of this life (the scene is as far from "ER" as you can get); the unsettling realization that Bodo, by taking the blood of a stranger into his own mouth, is endangering his own life. It's the kind of sequence that melts away the space between the viewer and the movie screen.

Sissi is finally rescued and rushed to the hospital, but she clings to Bodo's hand the whole time; when he finally slips away from her, she's left clinging to the button she's torn from his jacket in her last effort to keep him near. Sissi feels the whole world in that button, and Tykwer makes us feel it too. He'll make a great movie someday. I'm hanging on to that button until he does.

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