Roleplays

She’s also showing that she can:

Pick up on it when somebody is trying to lie to her.

Talk them into revealing the holes in their story.

Remember key pieces of evidence that support her point (she says that she saw it a year ago— I bet she could cite the exact issue if needed).

Leverage the ‘dumb blonde girl’ stereotype to make people underestimate her.

In other words, all of the qualities that go on to make her such a good lawyer.

In fact, this scene mirrors exactly how she ends up winning her final case: she acts dumb so that the witness lets her guard down, fixates on seemingly trivial details (“you were in the shower?” “How many perms have you had?”) and then pulls out some extremely specialised knowledge (“ammonium thioglycolate”) that proves the witness has been lying all along.

This scene is arguably one of the most important in the film, because it’s the scene that makes all the rest of the film— Elle succeeding at Harvard as well as she does, and becoming such a good lawyer in such a short time (“like it’s hard?”)— make sense.