The Mole Agent

 El agente topo (The Mole Agent) is a Chilean film that is nominated for Best Documentary and also Best Foreign Film in tonight's Oscars. Since it's raining, I decided to catch up on a couple of the nominated films before the ceremony. The premise of the film is that a woman hires a private detective to investigate the institution where her elderly mother is living, to see if she is being treated well. The private detective in turn hires a man in his eighties to go live in the home and report back on conditions and the treatment of his client's mother. The man who is hired, Sergio, is given a pen with a camera and glasses with a camera. At the same time, the documentary crew has already been installed in the home, ostensibly to make a film about the everyday life of the elderly. When Sergio arrives, they are able to film his interactions with the residents, as he goes from spying for his job to getting to know the residents, almost all of them women, who are mostly lonely because nobody comes to visit them. The film is touching and funny, and I did cry. 

I had some misgivings about the invasion of privacy inherent in the project: not so much for the nursing home and whether or not they were mistreating the residents--they were treating them very well--as for the residents themselves. They may be elderly, but do they want their frailty, their memory problems, their emotional struggles, to be fodder for an undercover genre experiment? I wondered if all the residents who ended up in the film were given releases to sign. The director says yes, that they showed the home the rough cut, and they ended up being very favorable to the film because it focuses on the plight of the lonely elderly, and the home comes off well.