For aggrieved wives of cheating husbands, a rising new professional service in China offers an innovative solution. Unlike the confrontational drudgery of couples therapy — and aiming to avoid the confrontational finality of divorce — this approach relies on subterfuge. Women of means can hire a “mistress dispeller” to infiltrate their partner’s affair, befriend the “other woman” without revealing their connection to the wife, and convince her to end the affair. This kind of marital embedding involves a whole lotta acting, as Elizabeth Lo’s compelling documentary reveals, but also uncovers a whole world of loneliness, heartache and occasional wisdom.
As she did with Stray, her exquisite canine-centric documentary, Lo set quite a challenge for herself with Mistress Dispeller. She aimed to capture one of these quadrangular dramas — the central triangle plus the role-playing hired gun — as its layers of deception and truth unfolded. According to the film’s production notes, where answers to some of the burning onscreen mysteries are revealed, Lo was prepared to take a more general approach to the subject if she couldn’t find participants who allowed her to get specific. Astoundingly, a trio of people chose to stick with the project through its several shifts in the baseline premise, as they understood it. The result is a sharp-eyed, open-ended inquiry into marriage and romance.
Mistress Dispeller
Provocative and quietly electric.
Lo began her inquiry with mistress dispeller Wang Zhenxi, who brings a fascinating mix of insight, compassion and role-play to her work. Mrs. Li, who shares a high-rise apartment with her husband and teenage daughter in Luoyang, in central China, hires Wang after she saw a woman’s text on her husband’s phone and instantly “knew everything.” Posing as a friend of Mrs. Li’s, Teacher Wang, as her clients call her, meets Mr. Li, who’s soon confiding in her. She convinces him to introduce her as his cousin to the woman he’s recently become involved with, 30-something Fei Fei, a hardworking entrepreneur from neighboring Zhengzhou. The intertwining levels of performance, not only by Teacher Wang, but by the husband and wife too, become dizzying, if not quite labyrinthine.
Offscreen, the Lis, who play badminton together and have been known to walk down the street holding hands, initially agreed to participate in a documentary about modern love. Onscreen, they’re the picture of marital disaffection, especially when he makes the age-old fatal error of not noticing her new haircut. It’s easy to dismiss him as another selfish middle-aged man whose “dilemma,” he tells Wang, is that he doesn’t want to divorce his wife or give up his girlfriend. But there’s a humble, pained sincerity in his description of being with Fei Fei as “like being in the sun,” compared with the day-to-day practicalities of life with his wife.
Handling DP duties as well as directing, Lo prefers long takes, her stationary camera at times permitting her to be outside the room when difficult conversations are taking place. Under the aegis of the modern-love project, she’s able to ride along in Mr. Li’s car and capture front-seat discussions that are as revealing as they are halting and strained. Sometimes, tragicomically, they’re punctuated by GPS instructions.
With superb work by editor Charlotte Munch Bengtsen (All That Breathes), Lo interweaves images of nature and the bustling city that lend context to the central drama without putting too fine a point on it. She offers glimpses of other Chinese “love industries,” capturing the artifice of a wedding photo session and a couple of matchmakers at work in their corporate office, discussing measurable attributes.
It’s not clear if Wang, who works out of a counseling center, is a licensed psychotherapist, but she’s not quite lying when she poses as someone who “works in education.” With her friendly, low-key approach, she’s gifted at helping people to shift perspectives and dispel emotional fog, a confessor who disguises therapy as conversation between friends. Some might call her a master manipulator. Explaining her methods to a colleague, she says that she’s “just a vessel” in her clients’ lives. She’s piercingly perceptive regarding the clashing, self-defeating desires of many women who become involved with married men, although she preemptively applies her conclusions to all of them.
As China’s economy has grown, so too has its incidence of adultery. Mistress dispellers’ mandate is clearly to restore a marriage’s wholeness and harmony. The assumption, of course, is that every marriage is salvageable — a specifically cultural concept, perhaps, but also one with universal resonance. I wonder whether Wang would ever advise a client to walk away from a rotten situation.
For all its big-picture significance, Lo never turns her central trio into emblems. They each arrive at new levels of self-understanding, some more than others. But however quietly they express these revelations, the enormity of their feelings is what propels the film, underlined by Brian McOmber’s brooding score and the aching intensity of a Puccini aria on the soundtrack.
For Fei Fei and Mr. and Mrs. Li, all this heart-opening stealth maneuvering leads to the kinds of conversations that nobody wants to be in, on either side of the equation. But everyone soldiers on. The doc opens with a title card explaining that the participants agreed to be in the film before certain truths were revealed to them, and also afterward. There’s undeniable bravery in that degree of commitment. Even Wang is a bit flummoxed by the final, extraordinary confrontation that Lo manages to orchestrate: “Normally,” the mistress dispeller says, “nobody is willing to do this.”
