Review: The Mole Agent Is a Moving Documentary About Age and Loneliness

The Mole Agent is so meticulously stylized and paced that it feels like fiction.

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Photo: Gravitas Ventures

In his monograph on the detective novel, German cultural critic Siegfried Kracauer argued that the hotel lobby is the paradigmatic scene of the private eye. To him, the people milling about the lobby are alienated individuals of vague origin, each attending to their own business. As such, the function of the perpetually suspicious detective is to put their hidden stories together from outward clues, to break through modern anomie and assemble an ordered picture of the world that can rationally explain the crime under investigation.

The hotel lobby of Maite Alberdi’s hybrid documentary The Mole Agent is a Chilean nursing home, and the detective at its center isn’t some cynical Sherlock Holmes type, but a sweet old man, Sergio, who’s hired by a private eye, Rómulo Aitken, to go undercover to investigate allegations of abuse against the home’s staff. Sergio, who doesn’t quite possess the covert gaze or savoir faire of the typical detective, wanders the home’s hallways openly taking notes about the residents’ bedroom locations and schedules, taking calls from Rómulo on speaker phone. But the octogenarian proves unable (or unwilling) to memorize the code they’re supposed to use for communications. Rather than surreptitiously observe the goings-on inside the home, he interrogates the staff directly about their handling of patients and their meds.

Across this cleverly shot film, viewers become the unobtrusive flies on the wall that Sergio can’t quite bring himself to be. Alberdi received permission to shoot inside the nursing home by telling its staff that she was making a documentary about old age. Undercover themselves, the crew then had to pretend they didn’t know Sergio when he showed up three weeks later—even though they had met him while filming the job interviews Rómulo conducted to find his “mole agent.” With their cover established, Alberdi and crew capture something of an undercover-cop cliché unfolding in real life: the gradual process of the mole becoming accepted, beloved, and integrated into the community he’s meant to be spying on.

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Rómulo’s first task is to find a woman named Sonia Réyes whose daughter has hired him to determine whether she’s been abused. But two complications arise: The home is populated almost entirely by elderly women, whom Sergio intimates mostly look the same to him, and many of these lonely women quickly develop an attachment to the healthy-seeming, smartly dressed, and chivalric newcomer. While being anointed king of the nursing home’s anniversary party and pulled into a one-sided romance with a woman, Berta, who’s been at the home for a quarter century, it takes him some time to locate the mostly senescent, taciturn Sonia.

The connections that the sympathetic and warm-hearted Sergio forms with his many admirers are truly endearing, but they aren’t, of course, what Rómulo is looking for. Both orderly and somewhat clueless, Sergio composes reports for Rómulo every night—long passages composed in a steady cursive and delivered via WhatsApp video messages. They read more like diary entries than espionage missives, a droll irony that Alberdi plays up by presenting Sergio’s dictation using the conventional low-key, shadow-drenched images of the spy movie. Rómulo’s increasingly frustrated messages come back in voiceover, with the private eye pleading with the older man to keep his reports more focused on the matter at hand.

In such moments, The Mole Agent is so meticulously stylized and paced that it feels like fiction. But to emphasize the very real presence of both people and camera, the filmmakers make a pair of surprising cameos. Early on, as Sergio tries on a pair of eyeglasses with a built-in camera, the reverse angle from his perspective shows us the camera and mic operators squeezed into the space behind Rómulo’s desk. And later, when some of the ladies of the home are lounging about outside, they idly point to the boom mic hovering above them.

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This playfulness reminds us that we don’t have immediate and transparent access to the lives of the residents of a nursing home upon entering such an establishment, but always a certain perspective on mere segments of those lives. That Alberdi’s camera itself is present in The Mole Agent as a quasi-ethical concern suits the way Sergio, as he shuffles through the home’s hallways, gradually comes to be uncomfortable with his own surveillance. He determines that the real crime hasn’t been theft or physical abuse on the part of staff or other residents, but the neglect of Sonia’s daughter and, by extension, Rómulo’s business and society as a whole. Sonia and the other lonely abuelitas are rarely visited, or—in other words—seen by their relatives. It’s a crime that the eye of Alberdi’s camera can reveal but not fully make right.

Score: 
 Director: Maite Alberdi  Screenwriter: Maite Alberdi  Distributor: Gravitas Ventures  Running Time: 89 min  Rating: NR  Year: 2020  Buy: Video

Pat Brown

Pat Brown teaches Film Studies and American Studies in Germany. His writing on film and media has appeared in various scholarly journals and critical anthologies.

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