El Agente Topo

Noticing this listed on my local PBS channel, I expected an ordinary documentary. Instead I found a deeply moving, multifaceted and fullfledged movie, with unexpected "stars" who are real people, living out their real lives. It left me with the desire to know more about each of them, and huge gratitude to my family who move everything aside to make sure my father can continue to live comfortably in his own home, with daily visits - and even more gratitude for my daughter who gives up everything to keep me happy in HER home, following unexpected multiple health catastrophes leaving me disabled at 60. Watch this movie, please, and see where it touches you. If it doesn't, watch it again.

I'm sure I wasn't the only one in the audience surprised by this one. Expecting a Jacques Tati or Peter Sellers bumbling detective comedy, we were instead served a heartfelt look into nursing home life. I've not yet had a close relative in a nursing home but the depiction of such a life as presented in this tragicomedy rang true. I was glad to have had this close look into the small pleasures, the great loneliness, and the irrepressible human spirit in its most twilight years.

Good movie, shows a terrible reality. The theme of the movie I think is oblivion. An approach to oblivion is always difficult as it can only be experienced when it is too late. Invites us to think about the responsibility of society in the life of the elderly, it is the responsibility of everyone or only of each one's family. Ungrateful Society or the inevitable pain and forgetfulness of the end of life?

I started watching it with mistrust, but in the end it stole my heart. Amazing how reality can be so bittersweet. Recommended especially for young people.

A funny and sweet documentary about an elderly man who takes a job as a double agent in a retirement community to report back on the treatment of one of its residents, whose daughter suspects is receiving poor care.

What the man finds instead is a nice community of old people trying to make the best of their loneliness. He makes a lot of friends and begins to enjoy his time there, but nevertheless finds a new appreciation for his own independence and his daughter, who hasn't abandoned him the way so many of the others who he befriends have been abandoned by their own families.

I thought other countries were generally better than America about taking care of its elderly, but this movie indicates that at least in Chile, where it's set, there's just as much of a tendency in children to let the care of their aging parents become somebody else's problem.

Grade: A-