THE MOLE AGENT

The Mole Agent streams at BIFF+ until October 31

I didn’t know what to expect from The Mole Agent even though I had seen the trailer before and I had read about the film. I knew that filmmaker Maite Alberdi wanted to make a documentary about spies, a sort of non-fiction film noir following the steps of an amateur spy hired by a professional private detective to investigate some every day situation. She allegedly changed her mind when she –and the private detective—found Sergio.

Sergio was one of the men who answered the ad offering a job for men between 80 and 90 years old. The gig was to go into a nursing home to spy and report about living conditions in there, how people were treated, especially the mother of the woman who had hired the private detective that hired Sergio. He, Sergio, 83 years-old, recently widowed, totally self-reliant, had a crash course in spying technology and off he went, to live for three months in a nursing home. He was a force of nature. He made everybody fall in love with him, including Alberdi, the filmmaker, who put aside her film noir and made an intimate wonderful movie about Sergio and the people he met at the nursing home.

That much I knew. I could guess that the movie was fun and moving, so in my bag, next to my mask and hand sanitizer, I put some tissues. I cry easily at movies. And I cried this time too. More than ever. Because the movie, so intimate, respectful and daring in its portrait of aging and old age, made me think about my grandmother, who turned 86 today in a land far away, farther than ever in this COVID era. It also made me think about my late father and my mother that ages, about my own aging self, about my daughter, my husband, and the subtlety and relentlessness passage of time.

There are many things going on in this movie. But, more than anything, there is dignity, and tenderness. A lot thanks to Sergio, but also thanks to Alberdi’s vision. In The Mole Agent the aging bodies have names and stories. They have lives. The movie brought to my mind the lecture that the writer Olga Tokarczuk gave upon receiving the Nobel Prize almost a year ago. She said in there: 

Tenderness is deep emotional concern about another being, its fragility, its unique nature, and its lack of immunity to suffering and the effects of time. Tenderness perceives the bonds that connect us, the similarities and sameness between us. It is a way of looking that shows the world as being alive, living, interconnected, cooperating with, and codependent on itself.

I guess that’s it. The Mole Agent made me feel part of its world, of the world. I could feel the pain of the people on it, their happiness, the sun in their faces on a given afternoon. I could imagine my grandma, my dad, my mom, my family and friends, all of us, going in the same direction, wondering the same things about life and death, following the film’s tender narrator on his path of late surprises and welcomed realizations.

Written by Soledad Marambio

* Tokarczuk’s Nobel lecture was translated from Polish to English by Jennifer Croft and Antonia Lloyd-Jones