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The Mole Agent

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 84^th 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”.

See also:

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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