Chapter 9 of 16 · 5'02"
Melodie's mother, Marietta, turns up in New York and is horrified by how her daughter is living, calling the apartment beneath her. She and Boris take an instant dislike to each other, trading insults, before she admits that her husband left her for her best friend.
Marietta Sees the Apartment
Marietta, Melodie's mother, arrives in New York and finds her daughter living in Boris's small apartment. She is appalled, and she and Boris insult each other on sight. Then she explains that her husband has left her for her best friend, and that the family has lost everything.
The chapter is a collision of two worlds that the film has been setting up all along. Marietta is loud, religious, and horrified by poverty, while Boris is a misanthrope who treats her as proof of everything he says about people. Their insults are funny, but they also reveal the film's class anxiety: Marietta cannot see past the shabby apartment, and Boris cannot see past her accent. The turn comes when she starts her story, because her troubles are real, not imagined. "Your father left me" lands quietly in the middle of the jokes, and suddenly the woman Boris is mocking is just someone who has lost almost everything.
A1–C2 is the CEFR scale. Cards above the level you pick fade, and playback will not auto-pause on them.
“Well, when you least expect it, fate has a way of knocking on your door.”
It turns a mother's sudden return into fate's practical joke, cozy and a little ominous.
Neutral
“Melody Saint Anne, I'd hardly call this all right!”
Using the full name plus a dry understatement, she delivers a whole verdict in one breath.
Informal
“I'd be happier if she married the catfish.”
It tops the insult by preferring a fish to the son-in-law, deadpan and merciless.
Informal
“It was as plain as the nose on your face. Cliché, sorry.”
A worn-out idiom names the affair, then the speaker apologizes for the cliché mid-sentence.
Informal
“All I know is that nothing moves faster than the speed of light, so you may as well relax.”
Physics becomes a punchline of reassurance, delivered with total deadpan.
Informal
Up next · 10the long and short of itThe scene: Marietta Argues and Plays MatchmakerShe has been searching for Melodie since she ran away. She says the police found no clues and that she kept praying until she finally tracked her daughter down.
She thinks it is beneath her daughter and calls it the kind of place a sharecropper would live in. She is shocked that Melodie has no help and cleans it herself.
They judge each other instantly. Marietta wanted a gentleman for her daughter, and Boris mocks her religion and her small-town world without holding back.
Her husband left her for her best friend, Mandy. After that he lost money in the stock market, they had to sell the house, he lost his job, and they spent their savings on medical bills.
