There is no contrivance in a nursing home - or at least not in this one. There is no pretending for the cameras; there is nothing and no one to pretend for. Although Sergio is nominally pretending, he's comically bad at it. The beauty of the movie is in Sergio and the characters who congeal around him, who are so whole and unguarded, so guileless and open, so full of life even as it rushes, sometimes frighteningly quickly, to an end.
I found myself feeling so bad for these people who are lonely and scared, and so angry at their families, who had abandoned them to the home. I found it a dark vision of what awaits in our final days, but when I asked Zanna if she thought it was bleak, she said no.
In To Be and to Have, some of the kids are suffering but their lives are full of hope. In the nursing home there was only hopelessness and death. I put this to Zanna but she disagreed.
I said: "But they've been abandoned! They're lonely and scared!"
She said: "But they're cute and funny too."
The moral of the story, I guess, is that life looks the way you think it looks.
SHE SAW
I have fallen head over heels in love with Sergio Chamy, the 85-year-old mole agent. He is the most charming, sweet, gentle, soft-spoken symbol of all that is good in the world and I understand in my bones why film-maker Maite Alberdi insisted he was the man for the job of nursing home infiltrator.
Chamy is the protagonist in the unique documentary The Mole Agent. Hired by a private investigator, with some coercion from Alberdi, he enters a nursing home in Chile to report on whether one of the residents is suffering elder abuse. The use of film noir conventions give The Mole Agent a classic spy movie aesthetic, while Chamy's technological ineptitude and conspicuous espionage give it a comical lightness reminiscent of the Pink Panther. He can't figure out how to operate the iPhone he's given, he almost immediately breaks the arm of his camera glasses and he loiters in hallways with the stealth of a vision-impaired elephant. The story was at times so perfectly executed that I started to question whether it was a documentary at all.
As the film progresses and Chamy becomes more embedded in the nursing home, the spy element falls away somewhat and it becomes a moving portrait of elderly women abandoned. The home is almost entirely female and Chamy becomes a companion and confidant to many. Although not a lot happens in the film, its 84-minute run time flies by. The conversations Chamy has with the residents and the friendships he forms are both heartwarming and heartbreaking. Over time he discovers that it's not the treatment these elders are receiving in the home that needs to be investigated but the treatment they're receiving from society and their own absent families.
Alberdi is a masterful documentarian and has crafted a beautifully cinematic film that is at once entertaining and poignant, while shining a light on an aspect of Western society - the abandonment of the elderly to homes - that is begging for a wider discussion. But the Mole Agent owes its greatness to its subjects - the beautiful, lonely women who society would rather ignore: Marta, the resident thief who's forever waiting for her mother to collect her; Berta, who may be a devout Catholic but would gladly give her virginity to Sergio; Rubira, a thoughtful woman who misses her children and grandchildren, and is all too aware that her mind is beginning to deteriorate. And, of course, Sergio, my one true love.
The Mole Agent is in cinemas now.
