The Mole Agent

Ser­gio Chamy is 83 years young. His wife has passed, he has an exten­sive fam­i­ly and he’s still got most of his mar­bles in tact. Yet a widower’s life can become repet­i­tive and lone­ly, so he responds to an ad from a detec­tive agency look­ing for some­one who’s over the age of 80 (tick), has all his mar­bles (tick), and wouldn’t feel moral­ly strick­en by the prospect of enter­ing a nurs­ing home for a three month spy­ing mis­sion (tick). The can­di­date would also need to have basic knowl­edge of smart­phone tech­nol­o­gy, par­tic­u­lar­ly in rela­tion to sur­rep­ti­tious video and audio record­ing (cross).

It feels wrong to refer to Maite Alberdi’s sweet lit­tle film as a doc­u­men­tary, as the whole set-up is itself a set-up, which has most­ly been staged and sculpt­ed. Yet the way she gets around the stig­ma of the cam­era is by telling the res­i­dents of the nurs­ing home that they are there film­ing for oth­er rea­sons, and that in turn allows the sub­jects to let their emo­tion­al guard down.

At the cen­tre is Ser­gio, and we ini­tial­ly watch he hap­haz­ard­ly peeks around doors, peers through win­dows, and search­es des­per­ate­ly for his mark – a with­drawn old­er woman whose daugh­ter believes she is being abused and swin­dled by their father. Our hero, unfor­tu­nate­ly, can­not recall the pho­to­graph he was shown of her, and so must go around in cir­cles mak­ing smalltalk with all the female res­i­dents – who seem to out­num­ber the male res­i­dents ten to one.

Every­one likes Ser­gio. Some express feel­ings that tran­scend sim­ple fond­ness. There are many fun­ny scenes of awk­ward courtship attempts, as some ladies see him as a major catch and are excit­ed at the prospect of being involved in the nurs­ing home’s first in-house wed­ding. It’s a breezy and bit­ter­sweet film, packed full of lov­able char­ac­ters and cap­tur­ing lots of awk­ward­ly inti­mate con­fronta­tions, and through Sergio’s jour­ney we see both the light and dark sides of enter­ing into your twi­light years.

It’s per­haps a lit­tle too slight for its own good, espe­cial­ly as the whole ​“agent” aspect is pret­ty much dis­pensed with at the half-way point. The nov­el­ty aspect of the spy­ing sub-plot also under­cuts some of the film’s more seri­ous, jour­nal­is­tic ambi­tions about the state of mod­ern care­giv­ing and the fact that these home are used as often to dump unwant­ed and pesky par­ents as they are venues for liv­ing out a more gre­gar­i­ous final act in life.