I think the choreography is quite significant, symbolically. The film is actually titled "The child from on high" in its original and has played throughout with the notion that Simon gets by in part by both craving to be a part of the social world "on high" - the one time he himself uses the phrase "en haut" ("on high") in the film is to rationalize that 'those people' are oblivious to his stealings and represent a world where money is easy and things are always replaceable - and also making his own 'living' (such as it is) off those well-heeled "on high" - and also inserting himself in it, at times facilely and at times very awkwardly and blatantly out of sync with it.
His "sister" has no such comfort zone "on high" (although "comfort zone" isn't quite the right term for him either - as brazenly as he zips in and out with his loot, almost as smoothly as one skiing through mogels, there is nevertheless a kind of constant tension we sense and occasionally see surface when he finds himself caught red-handed. Its implicit that she would not be able to pass herself off as from 'on high' and while more than content to live off his means, she also doesn't seem to display the same brazenness that makes him so independent a creature amongst them. She also lights up at a prospect of becoming one of them but by winning over well-heeled lovers, yet with a degree of dependence that is a relic of traditional gender roles - and which plays out even in their "sibling" dynamic as she lets him be the breadwinner and where she allows herself to blow his hard-"earned" booty.
(SPOILER ALERT)
So when we see them passing in opposite directions on the ski lift, he coming down from "on high," it's not coincidence that, when she finally acts on a maternal instinct and need to find him, it's a moment that has led her to go searching for him in his adopted world on high just as he is resurrecting himself from his despair and sense of complete abandonment at ski season's end and heading down - to the world he was born into, his modus operandi now inoperative for the foreseeable future. He is descending from his false-self manipulation of that world 'on high' to have to find a new m.o., while feeling the failure of a would-be emotional fantasy with the English mother he 'adopted', whose affection he has blown and lost, and thinking he is also now totally alone in the world as his real mother had already abandoned him too, with words of rebuke and resentment of his existence.
Their passing in opposing ski lift cabins provides (as well as the symbolism of their respective uphill-downhill m.o.s for survival) a way to depict symbolically the gulf between these two, where survival drives have made them mutually suspect of each other's true priorities (he especially of hers) and there has been ruptured trust between them that has played out in ongoing ways, creating walls and seemingly unbridgeable gap of two passing cable cars, but they are glass walls that allow them to see each other and to pound their buried emotional bond, their respective vulnerabilities, with their open palms on the glass toward one another. To me, it is a moment of rebirth, especially for Simon who has perhaps never seen such a potent sign that he genuinely matters - enough to be searched for by someone who knows him just enough to know to look for him "on high."
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