The Perth Festival is showing a bunch of interesting looking films at the Somerville Auditorium on the grounds of UWA. This one, The Mole Agent, runs Feb 1st to 7th. It's well worth a look.
Documentary
makers, like all film makers, are constantly on the lookout for ways to present
their message. The styles available to documentary as a genre are seemingly
limited, which is why Maite Alberdi’s The
Mole Agent seems so fresh. She has chosen to couch her story in the figure
of a genuinely sweet old widower named Sergio. His task is to go undercover in
a nursing home in Chile and report back to a private detective regarding a
client’s mother. And there is the simple genius in the telling of the story.
Rather than staging this as a newsy expose, with lurid details and sensational
confrontations, Sergio acts as a conduit for the very real, very lonely
situations of the residents of the home. His conversations with them are
basically interviews but these are portrayed with the empathy and emotion that
come with sharing a generation.
The film begins with a group of elderly men applying for the job of ‘mole’ and its whimsical nature is immediately clear. These disarming old guys are keen until family responsibilities and a mystification about technology whittle the field down to one – Sergio. There’s an interesting discussion between Romulo the detective, Sergio and Sergio’s daughter, Dalal about duty of care and the legal ramifications of secretly filming in the home. This felt like a peek behind the curtains to the actual making of the documentary and the conclusion of this chat was one of the most touching moments in a film littered with them.
The home,
as depicted here, is dominated by women, many of whom take a shine to the
urbane Sergio. There are some real heart-wrenching scenes – Berta decides to declare
her love for Sergio and is stoic when she is rebuffed. Rubira can’t remember if
her family have visited her or not. Marta has a habit of stealing and wonders
why her mother hasn’t picked her up yet. All of them are suffering in one way
or another.
There are
also moments of warmth, mainly due to Sergio’s affecting ineptitude. He must be
the worst spy in South America, much to the frustration of Romulo. But with his new friends, he’s supremely popular. At one point he’s crowned king of the home, later he’s serenaded at
his 84th birthday party.
It’s fair
to ask how much of the film was genuine and how much was staged but at the same
time this is almost irrelevant as the film succeeds in revealing the lives and
troubles of people in aged care. The resolution of whether the San Francisco
Care Home was guilty of anything pales beside the more pertinent issue of
industrial scale abandonment of the elderly. As Alberdi says, “I would
like people who watch this movie to leave the movie theatre wanting to call
their parents or grandparents. It is an invitation to look within yourself and
ask what you can do better”.
This is a tough one. I can really only come up with Ricky Gervais' TV show Derek (2012-2014), which is set in a nursing home. It's not his best work but it has some nice moments (and some disgusting ones, too).
[This review was also published on the Film Ink website - https://www.filmink.com.au/reviews/the-mole-agent/]
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