Third place:
There and back again: a border crossing tale, Sicario [168.5 points / 16 votes] (note: the above video is from the final five minutes or so of this scene)
Second place:
“How much for the Cheetos and water?”, Magic Mike XXL [186.5 points / 18 votes]
And the Muriel goes to…
“Speak Low” (final scene), Phoenix [219 points / 19 votes]
(click image to view scene on YouTube)
(SPOILER ALERT!!!)
“Speak low when you speak, loveOur summer day withers away too soon, too soon
Speak low when you speak, love
Our moment is swift, like ships adrift, we're swept apart, too soon…”
“The strains of Kurt Weill’s “Speak Low” haunt Christian Petzold’s Phoenix like a ghost, a faint train whistle heard wafting through the fog of the past. It’s the first thing we hear on the soundtrack as the movie opens, a tentative, weighted melody tiptoeing through the dark of night on a upright string bass line, cushioned by a spare piano accompaniment, as a World War II concentration camp survivor, her head wrapped in bandages, her damaged, violated countenance hidden, is transported across Allied lines toward the safety of a hospital where she will undergo reconstructive facial surgery. The melody of “ ‘Speak Low’ is heard in many variations throughout the film— in that piano/bass opening, crackling over a speaker from a 78 rpm record, and interwoven into the film’s score, a perfectly chosen pop standard whose romantic longing and loss expands into the very text and fabric of the film.
The woman under the bandages is Nelly Lenz (Nina Hoss), a singer in Berlin in the days before her arrest. After the surgery which, in a fashion, restores her face to a semblance of her past visage, Nelly longs only to return to her husband Johnny (Ronald Zehrfeld), a pianist and her accompanist in their previous life, who may have been the one who betrayed her to the Nazis. He realizes her resemblance to his wife, who he assumes was killed in the camp, but he doesn’t recognize her as Nelly, and soon he involves his wife in a scheme to essentially impersonate herself in order to lay claim to the money which lays waiting in her estate.
“This painful reconstruction of Johnny’s version of Nelly provides the rapturous and agonized tension that informs the film. How far can Nelly’s imposed masquerade go before Johnny’s blindness to the identity of the woman he is essentially rehearsing back into consciousness is lifted? After months of desperately trying to render herself believable in his eyes (‘Stop playing Nelly! It’s not me you must convince!’), she begins to realize the depth of his betrayal and refuses to go through with the last stage of his plan—a series of cuts on her arm meant to suggest that ‘Nelly’ has mutilated herself in order to remove her camp tattoo. When the reunion with Johnny and the surviving friends from their mutual past is finally staged, we hear Nelly sing for the very first time.
:Hoss, magnificent throughout, brings the focus of the movie’s final scene to such quiet intensity that the screen feels as though it might implode. The foundation of his ruse now complete, their friends now convinced that Nelly has indeed returned (as she, of course, has), Johnny is now the only person in the film who still believes that Nelly is not actually Nelly. Happy over this unlikely return from the past, Nelly’s friends ask her to sing for them, with Johnny at the piano, and she suggests they perform ‘Speak Low.’ He begins playing, a look of smug satisfaction on his face, and she tentatively begins to eke out the tune’s first verse, as if in the process of discovering how to play this last act of deception.
“But then Nelly, settling into the body language of a singer returned to her milieu, relaxes, leans ever so slightly onto the piano, toward not her audience but to Johnny, and begins the second verse. Suddenly the voice we hear is not that of a feigned imposter unsure of how next to proceed, but the clear, strong, beautifully modulated voice of Nelly, singing with heartbreaking empathy, as she must have in the world before the war, the crushed longing of Ogden Nash’s lyrics to Weill’s insinuating melody, which itself speaks low, expressing tumultuous and subterranean feeling within a weave of indulgent romanticism. As a voice from the past transforms in his head from approximation to authenticity, the look on Johnny’s face ossifies, its smugness slowly replaced by the blank stare that accompanies complete recognition. Nelly’s look back at him betrays no emotion, only quiet revelation, confrontation, satisfaction that she has finally achieved the only real aim that ever motivated her beyond her improbable survival. In full voice now, she faces him fully, and we now see what he sees—the sleeve of her red dress lifted on her forearm, partially revealing the tattoo he presumed this imposter would have never had. Johnny stops playing entirely, but Nelly continues, her words suggesting a ticking clock whose mechanism will soon stop altogether:
“We're late, darling, we're late/
The curtain descends, everything ends too soon, too soon...”
“But Nelly herself can no longer carry on. She sings two more words of the song—‘I wait’—and then stops herself. She no longer waits. Nelly has indeed been reborn, the scales having fully fallen away, all deception finally at an end. Petzold brilliantly understands that the wrenching drama of the entirety of the film, which has always been understated and tentative where it could have been morbid and excessively melodramatic, is crystallized in this moment, and he expresses it with an exquisite modulation that fully informs and honors Nelly’s journey of tentative rediscovery. All sound now having ceased, Nelly rises from her place at the piano, turns from Johnny and moves toward the open door, away from her unseen audiences, those in the room and we in the theater. The wide screen image loses focus entirely. All we can now see is her blurred form draped in a splash of red as she slips through the white curtain, out of the house, out of the film, into uncertainty, and into memory once again.”~ Dennis Cozzalio
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