Simon's relationship with Gillian Anderson's character
I might not have written about this except that I read Manohla Dargis's review of the film and she wrongly conveyed the dynamics by which Simon and Gillian Anderson's character meet (a surprising error in reporting on film plot, although because I only read reviews after seeing films, heaven knows i've seen reviewers, notably including Ebert, who often get the character's relationships wrong in their reviews - e.g, boyfriend instead of husband or vice versa, saying someone was sister-in-law who was ex-wife or such, that kind of thing).
I'm going to link to the Dargis review and quote the lines i'm referring to and then my own reply to her on NYT that elaborates beyond the error in describing how the two characters meet to my own further thoughts on what this relationship tells us about Simon and the film's themes.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/05/movies/sister-directed-by-ursula-meier.html?module=Search&mabReward=relbias%3Aw%2C{%221%22%3A%22RI%3A10%22}#preview
Their meeting beautifully shows how Ms. Meier can turn the simple into the complex, filling a small exchange with reverberant meaning. Simon meets the English Lady, a resort guest, when she sees him loitering at a restaurant and invites him to join her and her children. They talk, with him easily gilding the truth, and then he tries to pay for their food. Surprised, she declines his offer. He insists, she resists, and the push and pull between them grows agonizing because in this one instance you see a lonely child’s yearning for home, family, mother, love. Here the act of one person noticing another — of looking at another human being instead of through him — is a simple kindness and a heartbreaking expression of our dependence on others.
and my response to Dargis's review:
It's a surprising error for Dargis to present a plot point that she elaborates on quite wrongly. Simon does not meet the English lady in the way Dargis suggests. They meet when Simon sees her putting on her young children's ski boots, sees the closure straps are set too tight for the child's foot and, as boldly as we've seen him steal, now also boldly intervenes to advise her about how to properly fit the ski boots. Dargis could just as easily have made her point around their actual first meeting because the woman does look at Simon, not through him, in her surprise and gratitude at being helped unasked by this young child (who she has every reason to believe does 'belong here' - is "from on high," as the film title toys with). We also see Simon gaze from afar, with longing, watching her apply sunscreen so tenderly to her child's face.
Then Simon sees her again one day while she's waiting for lunch to be served with her kids and he approaches her, at which point she responds - more out of a kind of slightly awkward English graciousness than from an ayptical-ski-guest openness per se as Dargis seems to suggest. Most significantly to me, a running theme of the film emerges when Simon (again boldly, defiantly and with a social inappropriateness one might see depicted in an autistic child) insists on trying to pay (with his latest ill-gotten cash) for their lunch, as we see just how thoroughly Simon has learned to see relationships through a lens of money, of a layer of conviction that money buys love and acceptance, not being able to feel it enough with the woman's kind gesture of inviting him to join them but craving more. And later in the story of this would-be mother-son bond, we see his boundaries completely dissolve in two directions, one in which he flings himself upon her for an embrace that is as tender as he knows how to be, another in which we see that Simon–not unlike a child raised by wolves–has developed indelible survival instincts that betray him.
And what i'll add here that NYT comment-length constraints didn't allow:
Gillian's character allows for a pivotal additional slant on Simon's already quite established world view. It brings into focus the convergence for him of the need for and power of love, hunger, and money. It's as if he has a kind of 2-dimensional script for a 3-dimensional personal craving for something he's ostensibly never experienced. As i said in a reply post elsewhere, the final scene would seem to represent to him a real, palpable sign that someone in his life (and lo and behold, at long last, his own mother) actually needs him for more than money (well, hopefully), actually searches for him and shows a look of desperation through glass "houses" and across a span of cables mid-air that says to him that just maybe he is loved and/or needed - as more than a grifter - in this world after all. The Gillian character had induced in him something that brought his emotional needs to the surface, only to be dashed, by his own doing - kind of Greek-tragedy-like in a way - although it only put a hard edge to a parting that would have happened anyway and might have left him with soft fantasy had he not also had to come to terms with how his modus operandi and now engrained survival instinct via stealing has shown itself to be not a way of buying love but losing it (fantasy or not).
Earlier in the film, in the first half somewhere, I'd developed the uncomfortable feeling that I was perhaps watching the making of a sociopath and feeling a real knife-edge in my degree of empathy for Simon's character. But the film did not , for me, fall over that 'knife edge' into either a depiction of true sociopathy (not the malice toward others that would lead to choosing to physically hurt another). In fact, his instinctive perception of Gillian's child's foot getting hurt by boot straps closing too tightly was illustrative of the 'knife edge' I felt I was on about Simon - I simultaneously saw it as suggesting an innate desire to see someone avoid pain while also, granted, a clever opportunistic entry point for him to insert himself into a relationship he readily sees as desirable and craves for himself.
In sum, kudos to the screenwriting and directing to include the pivotal 'secondary' relationship into the film as it reverberated into the primary relationship in the film and allowed much of the ambivalences and competing self-interests within Simon's character and his choices about what to privilege within his own needs and wants to play out quite believably. share