The shapely brunette slips on the freshly mopped floor and goes down. Hard. Loses her dignity and the heel on one of her shoes.
It's a laugh, a meet-cute for Catherine Zeta-Jones and Tom Hanks in "The Terminal" and perhaps a signal that, despite appearances to the contrary, her character, Amelia, really doesn't have the world by the tail.
She has been a flight attendant since age 18, has been seeing a married man for years, is an avid reader of history books and regularly lies about her age. Amelia tells everyone she's 33, men think she's even younger, but she's really 39.
"She's a vulnerable woman," Zeta-Jones, 34, said in a phone interview from Los Angeles. "And then, her dreams didn't come true in the way she thought her Prince Charming would come riding on a white stallion, and she's kind of confused by that . . . She's a really good girl and she has a wonderful heart, and she doesn't quite understand what went wrong. And I think she's a creature of habit . . . We all know women who have a pattern, even women who just go back to the guy who beats them."
No one's beating anyone in this movie. No homicidal hoofers, either, unlike "Chicago," the Rob Marshall dazzler that won Zeta-Jones an Academy Award for best supporting actress.
Hanks is Viktor Navorski, a resident of the fictitious Krakozhia whose country erupts in a coup while he's traveling to John F. Kennedy International Airport. After he lands, he learns he cannot leave the airport, but he also cannot return home.
"Currently, you are a citizen of nowhere," he is informed.
Viktor, who speaks almost no English at the start, ends up adopting the airport, with its Burger King and Brookstone and Starbucks and other chains, and the airport employees take him under their wing, too.
He befriends Zeta-Jones, a flight attendant who regularly breezes through, but theirs isn't the standard Hollywood romance. She calls it a beautiful friendship between kindred spirits.
"It's more of a courting. The art of courting, of being friends before you're lovers, is slowly slipping away from us, in the life and in the movies."
It was a phone call from director Steven Spielberg that sealed the deal for Zeta-Jones, who knew Hanks was set to star. "Steven called me up and said, 'I have a script that I'm really proud of, that I'm going to direct, and I'd love you to read it and see if you want to come on board."
Zeta-Jones is on a roll with good directors, working with Steven Soderbergh on "Traffic," Rob Marshall on "Chicago," the Coen brothers on "Intolerable Cruelty" and, now, Spielberg. "Actors go for a long career without having the ability to work with such talent. I feel very privileged."
The terminal, which included four working escalators, was built from the ground up in a hangar in Palmdale, Calif. "It even smelled like an airport, just the extras and the stores and the sheer expanse of it, it just blew my mind," says Zeta-Jones.
Asked if she has a new appreciation for airport workers, Zeta-Jones mentions a BBC-produced documentary about life at London's Heathrow Airport.
"I was really fascinated by it . . . they have a paparazzi group that just goes to the airport, and I'm not usually fascinated by paparazzi."
Actors and flight attendants are both peripatetic creatures, living out of suitcases, setting up home in different locations around the world.
"I can completely relate right now. I flew in from Spain two nights ago, worked all day yesterday, did Jay Leno's show, did the premiere, woke up this morning, been talking since God knows when, and I'm having one of those transient what-country-am-I-in moments and that hits you in the stomach kind of midday. What time is it? What time is it in my country? What time is it here?"
She has been in Spain filming "Ocean's 12" — she plays a European Interpol agent and can finally use her own Welsh accent — and next will head to Mexico to reunite with Antonio Banderas for "Zorro 2."
Zeta-Jones, who had to execute much fancier footwork in "Chicago," took the opening spill in "Terminal" a few times but says, "And then, we had to get someone in who really wanted to break their coccyx bone ."
And speaking of Chicago, her voice floods with extra warmth when Marshall, prepping "Memoirs of a Geisha," is mentioned.
"He's probably the most inspirational person I've ever met, and he makes you just want to do your absolute best and you'll do anything for him — and we did."