Be honest. When Nicole revealed that she spoke English all along, were you shocked? Or did you see it coming? I was pretty surprised myself. They did a great job of leading us to believe she was just an uneducated pawn in the sex-marriage con game, and she had to rely on her cousin to speak English for her.
shareI didn't shock me. When Alexi and Yuri showed up, and the way they showed up, I knew she wasn't kosher. It was then that I wondered if she spoke English.
shareLearn this thing: if there's a character in a movie who is claimed not to understand/speak English while everybody else does, and it would made a huge impact on the story if he/she would, it will be revealed he/she understood/spoke English all along.
It is basically Chekhov's gun:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chekhov%27s_gun
"If you say in the first chapter that there is a rifle hanging on the wall, in the second or third chapter it absolutely must go off. If it's not going to be fired, it shouldn't be hanging there."
Works 9 out of 10 times. It became so predictable in the past years that nowadays the opposite would work better: having a character who everyone assumes will reveal he speaks English, but the twist never comes, and that is the twist.
good post Zee. I have learned this as THE most easy thing to predict in movies:
If you show a woman throwing up, she is pregnant. Every time.
Indeed! However, I must admit I didn't realize that in this movie. I have no idea why. You're right that it's really at least as much predictable as the language speaking thing.
Maybe I forgot to think about it because throwing up was not relevant to the story at that point, while (not) speaking English was.
I can't think of a single movie other than this one that fits into this trope.
share