As the title suggests, The Tinder Swindler is a story of a weaselly, money-hungry scumbag who you can't wait to see get his comeuppance. Through interviews with three of his victims — strangers who join forces to take him down — the documentary exposes the wildly successful con he's pulling, bankrupting countless women so he can live a life of extreme luxury.
Greg suggested that there was another documentary begging to be made, about how Simon came to be a fraudster — clearly he has an obsession with the high life and an intolerance for poverty, in which he likely grew up. We argued about the relevance of Simon's childhood suffering, which I maintain is nowt.
The real triumph of this film is the fact it's streaming to Netflix's 209 million subscribers. It'll be very hard for Simon to keep up this ruse now. Whether it did something interesting with this story or not is irrelevant: The Tinder Swindler will save countless women from broken hearts and crippling debt.
HE SAW
Zanna didn't want to watch this movie but she agreed to it, I think, because this is this magazine's love issue and the movie asks big questions about the power of love to make us do things we shouldn't. Nevertheless, it was clear she didn't love it. Halfway through, she asked me to pause it and said, "I want to see what happens next, but it's not really review-worthy, is it?" When I asked what she meant by "review-worthy", she said, "It's not very filmic." I said it was perfectly review-worthy, that this is the love issue, etc, etc, but I expected a long and strenuous debate, so was surprised by the speed with which she agreed to carry on. A few minutes later, I looked over and saw she was asleep.
The movie focuses on the stories of several women who give enormous sums of money they don't have to the eponymous swindler, and then set out to get justice. You've got to be careful what you believe in these days of information manipulation and illiteracy. We've never been more suspicious of what we're told, but in our personal hierarchies of trustworthiness, those we love are generally at the top. There is no more powerful force than love and that's the force the man at the centre of The Tinder Swindler employs to dupe intelligent women out of large sums of money: make them fall in love and they'll do anything. It seems hard to believe — and is — but, as Mickey and Sylvia sang in 1957 and on the soundtrack to Dirty Dancing, the greatest love story I'd ever watched when I was 10:
Love is strange
Lot of people
Take it for a game
Once you get it
You never want to quit, no no
After you've had it
You're in an awful fix.
I found the movie compelling and the women's plight moving. I can't say for sure what Zanna thought. She watched the last hour of the movie the next day, by herself.
The Tinder Swindler is now streaming on Netflix.
