8 | Sight&Sound | April 2020
RUSHES- The Mole Agent
Maite Alberdi, Chile
Directed by Chilean filmmaker Maite Alberdi,
this documentary follows the exploits of unlikely
spy-in-the-making Sergio, an 83-year-old
retiree hired by a detective agency to infiltrate
a retirement home in Chile’s capital, Santiago.
Prompted by concerns of possible abuse and
neglect, a resident’s daughter has called upon
the services of the agency to uncover the truth.
After being trained in the art of operating a
smartphone and issued with strict instructions
for regular dispatches from the inside, Sergio
is unleashed into the wild. As one of the few
male residents, Sergio, with his dapper style and
attentive manner, swiftly becomes a favourite
among the elderly female residents. But as he
gets to know his new friends better, it appears
the truth may be more mundane and more bitter
than meets the eye. The 007 franchise might have
glamorised the secret agent tale with mechanical
efficiency, but this OAP spy story has a real heart.
Anjana Janardhan - Kajillionaire
Miranda July, US
After a nine-year absence from making features,
Miranda July, the director of The Future (2011)
and Me and You and Everyone We Know (2005), is
back with a bracingly strange and sweet indie:
a comedy that recasts parenting as a Michael
Mann-style criminal enterprise until romance
interrupts, distracting all involved. Living on
the poverty line, middle-age schemers Robert
(Richard Jenkins) and Theresa (Debra Winger)
have trained their mirthless, ultra-competent
grown-up daughter (a revelatory Evan Rachel
Wood) to be a master thief. The clan’s two-bit cons,
like the movie itself, are just this side of ridiculous.
Not ridiculous at all, however, is the arrival
of Melanie (Jane the Virgin’s Gina Rodriguez),
a garrulous stranger who’s on to them – and
wants in on the action. July used to traffic in
pure uncut quirkiness; Kajillionaire sees her
exploring welcome new registers of euphoria,
sincerity, cynicism and even metaphysical
awakening. Her latest could, in time, join the
likes of The Big Lebowski (1998) and Inherent Vice
(2014) as an off-the-grid, only-in-LA treasure.
Joshua Rothkopf - The Truffle Hunters
Michael Dweck and Gregory
Kershaw, Italy/US/Greece
Opening a window on an aromatic trade that’s
dying off, this lovely, bittersweet documentary
- directed by Michael Dweck and Gregory
Kershaw, the inspired team behind The Last
Race (2018) – is an introduction to the art of
truffle-hunting, practised by a cadre of greying
northern Italians and the dogs they treat like
lucky charms. These human-canine teams go
into the woods to their secret spots, and dig up
clods of heavenly stink that end up selling for
thousands of euros. (To watch a week’s harvest
being hyped up by a whispering merchant
in an alley, you’d think you were watching a
drug deal go down – and, in a way, you are.)
Formally reserved and composed of medium-
to-long shots, the film doesn’t trade in foodie porn.
Instead, we attune our senses to subtler virtues:
the indefinable companionship between man
and beast, and the mystical quiet of the forest.
Joshua Rothkopf- Minari
Lee Isaac Chung, US
Lee Isaac Chung’s Minari draws upon his
memories of growing up in the 1980s. Named
after a lush perennial herb found in East Asia,
Minari is the tale of a Korean-American family
who move from California to rural Arkansas,
led by Jacob (Steven Yeun), who seeks a better
life for his wife Monica (Han Yeri) and children
Anne (Noel Cho) and David (Alan Kim).
Seen through the eyes of its youngest
protagonist, the film is a moving reflection
on the struggles of new beginnings and the
exquisite pain of familial love. When David’s
grandmother arrives from Korea, it appears
as if her irreverent presence might be just the
glue needed to strengthen the bonds between
this family in flux. Imbued with rich detail
and delightfully mischievous humour, this
is a film whose emotional undercurrents
sweep over you when you least expect it.
Anjana Janardhan - Identifying Features
Fernanda Valadez, Mexico/Spain
The media is awash with stories about
immigration, expressing nascent fears about the
influx of so-called illegal visitors, but rarely is the
curtain lifted on the personal stories of those left
behind. In her debut feature Mexican director
Fernanda Valadez employs fiction to illustrate the
dark realities of the perilous journeys undertaken.
Magdalena (Mercedes Hernández) is at the
police station to report her son missing after
leaving home to make his way towards the
US border. Pressured into declaring him dead
after his belongings are found, she embarks
on a journey to retrace his steps and discover
the truth. She meets Miguel (David Illescas), a
recent deportee from the US, and together they
make their way across Mexico avoiding the
dangers – seen and unseen – along the way. Valdez
combines stunning cinematography, evocative
sound design and hints of magic realism to
create a visionary work of devastating power.
Anjana Janardhan- Dick Johnson Is Dead
Kirsten Johnson, US
Cinematographer Kirsten Johnson has been
shooting documentaries for more than 25 years.
And yet, by her own admission, she’s never
encountered a subject as difficult as the one she
chose for her directorial follow-up to Cameraperson:
to document her 82-year-old father’s decline
after he has been diagnosed with dementia.
Equipped with experience – her late mother
had Alzheimer’s – Johnson sets out to make
a double-portrait. One is fictive, as her father
enacts his death many times over. Hit by a falling
air-conditioning unit, falling down the stairs,
stabbed: Dick Johnson gleefully anticipates
his own demise, crowned with vaudevillian
biblical fantasies. But the other part is completely
true and its agony will wreck you: Johnson
reminiscing with her father, and the growing
awareness of all the Johnson siblings that their
happiest moments are rapidly fading from his
mind. It’s a film about dying that profoundly
manifests one man’s unbounded desire to live.
Ela Bittencourt - The Fight
Elyse Steinberg, Josh Kriegman
and Eli Despres, US
The documentary The Fight focuses on the fierce
assault on civil liberties in Donald Trump’s
America. In the film, four lawyers from the
American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) take on
the current government by filing immigration,
census, LGBT+ and reproductive-rights cases.
A briskly paced celebration of unsung heroes,
The Fight begins as a high-spirited behind-the-
scenes tale, offering a peek at the ACLU offices,
with jokes about unwieldy gadgets and small
talk about the pressures on family time. But the
humour is soon overshadowed by the suffering in
the cases themselves: a trans war veteran denied
the ability to serve; a young rape victim fighting
ultra-conservatives for an abortion; a mother and
child forcibly separated at the border; and a plan to
include a citizenship question on the census, seen as
an insidious attempt to intimidate non-citizens. It’s
impossible not to tear up during The Fight, whose
message is not so much that each era calls for new
heroes, but that ours are very dark times indeed.
Ela Bittencourt
83-year-old Sergio, with his
dapper style and attentive
manner, soon becomes a favourite
among the elderly female residents
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