I fear the last years of life more than I do the nonyears of death. A fear which the documentary “Mole Agent” does nothing to dispel. Were it not for Chilean director Maite Alberdi’s cleverness you would probably not seek out her subject matter in this documenatary.
The subject is life in a Chilean nursing home, a home which has me thinking that learning Spanish and moving to Chile might be a good idea. Staff is plentiful in that nursing home and there are frequent staff-supervised parties meant to give residents a good time and bring them together.
But the lives Alberdi reveals—alas, they are exactly what I expected to see. There is a lot of fretting around waiting for outsiders to arrive. Relatives are desired but strangers will do very well. It is as if no two residents have enough spark between them to keep a conversation going.
In this film a stranger is temporarily inserted to live among the residents. He is a spy, a mole as it were, with a single purpose. However his presence provides companionship for many of the residents. And then—when he leaves it is pretty clear that these residents will return to solitary lives.
This movie is not only a documentary, it is a narrative. Everyone “plays” themself. Although many scenes are clearly set up in advance, the only visible directing is done by the mole’s control, Romulo. Romulo’s mole agent is an 83 year old man named Sergio. This is real life. Alberdi has used it to create a story line for her documentary.
Alberdi found a detective agency with a client who wanted to know if her mother, a nursing home resident, was being mistreated. Sergio was chosen to investigate this by Romulo with input from Alberdi. At the beginning of the film we see how Romulo interviews prospective moles. Sergio is not the first mole he has placed in a nursing home.
It is not a spoiler to say that Sergio succeeds in his mission. But viewers are left with the impression that the client is using Sergio in lieu of visiting her mother herself. This is not the case. Romulo explains to Sergio that the client visits her daughter are on weekends while Sergio himself is out of the nursing home visiting his own daughter. Sergio apparently doesn’t believe this and, because the explanation must be understood from two passing references that have no supporting evidence, you are likely to share Sergio’s scepticism.
That one misconception aside, Sergio turns out to be the perfect choice for the role of a nursing home mole. The documentary was not planned with the intention of revealing the personality of an exemplary human being but that is what it does.
Alberdi was able to take advantage of Sergio’s unintended importance by adjusting her camera work and edits.
Early in the film Sergio’s conversations with other residents are shown from enough distance to include two people in the frame. This distance has us viewing conversations as observers, documentary style. Later the film becomes more of a narrative and we start to see close ups of the people speaking or being spoken to. This style of camera work brings us into the story itself. We are no longer mere observers.
Another change the film undergoes is in the editing. At first the film consists of segments that are rather like points in an outline, which is to say the transitions that are suitable for a documentary. As the film progresses, transistions from one scene to another are more like we expect to see in narrative films. Transitions are diddled to show connections. For example there is a scene in which one woman peels petals off a flower repeating a “he loves me, he loves me not” sequence while thinking of Sergio. The peeling ends with “he loves me a lot”. Then we see the petals floating away on a film of water, an indication of the significance of that conclusion. The petals then change to leaves which are being swept away and that scene expands to show the sweeper and then Sergio himself. The woman first and Sergio second are not points in an outline. They are part of a narrative.
Critics polled by Metacritic.com are not particularly enthusiastic about this film, but viewers seem to have found something to like in it. Perhaps you will too. After watching you can ask yourself: what is the difference between Sergio and the nursing home residents? Can he go back to living on the outside because he is more alive? Or are the residents less alive because they must live inside?