During the movie, My Big Fat Greek Wedding, there was a lot of positive and negative communication that influenced the main character’s life decisions. The story is about a young woman, named Toula, that is of Greek decent who is fearful of being stuck in the life she is now living. She is a frumpy girl that works in her family’s restaurant because she has not been able to find a Greek man to marry, and because of this, her family claims that she is old and has failed in life. She is allowed to attend college, which in turn, gives her new confidence and she is able to fall in love with a non-Greek man that is named, Ian. During the movie she struggles to get her family to accept him as the man she loves, and she also finally comes to
The same thing also happened in the travel agency when Toula hid behind the water dispenser when Ian turned his back to her to talk with his friend. When he turned back around he could not find her and he walked off. Before Ian ran into the older lady on the street in front of the travel agency, he was using the gesture of possibly a duck, to get Toula’s attention and to make her laugh. This gesture made her laugh and smile and it was able to help her loosen up and feel a little more comfortable. Ian had to deal with the language barrier a few times in the movie, but there were two scenes that were quite comical. Ian asked Nick, how do you say “thank you” in Greek and he also asked Angelo, Toula’s cousin, how to say “everyone let’s go in the house,” and both times he was told something entirely different. This is similar to the “English-speaking representative of a U.S. soft drink manufacturer naively drew laughs from Mexican customers when she offered free samples of Fresca soda pop. In Mexican slang, the word fresca means ‘lesbian’(Adler).” In both of these cases, Ian and the representative thought they were saying one thing but it meant something else in the other language. Empathy was shown in the movie when Toula was turned down by her father for wanting to go to college for computer classes. When this happened her mother, Maria, showed empathy. Empathy means being able to experience the world form the other