Who Is Your Girlfriend?
If you’re a cinephile, you’ve probably noticed that usually in a fiction, following an intimate scene between two characters, the next scene is a shot of one of them getting dressed.
However, if you look closely at the beginning of episode 9, you’ll see that instead of following the scene of intimacy between Carmen and Claire, with one of them getting dressed, the director and the editor have chosen to show Sydney buttoning up her uniform as if she were the one who had slept with Carmen.
This means that the ambiguous montage, which starts during the “Bolognese” episode when Carmen says he’s going to call his girlfriend, continues through to the “Omelette” episode, during which Carmen has his panic attack.
For me, it’s another subtle way of showing us, that everything is mixed up in Carmen’s head because he’s never had a girlfriend before Claire and because the only definition he was given when he asked Fak (2x8) is that a girlfriend is a woman he is supposed to love very much.
And since he seems to like Sydney a lot, she fits that definition too, doesn’t she?
This means that even though Claire is his official girlfriend, deep down, it’s Sydney he wants and it’s Sydney he needs.
Which explains why Carmen later felt the need to whisper sweet nothings to Sydney under the table.
It’s an unconscious way of compensating for his frustration. It’s a roundabout way to make love to Sydney.
