Teaching Wang in her office. Image credit: Elizabeth Lo. Courtesy of the filmmakers
What happens when three’s a crowd in a marriage? One possible answer, as Elizabeth Lo finds, is to sneak in a special fourth person. In her sophomore feature documentary Mistress Dispeller, Lo peers into a new “love industry” in China by following four individuals: a middle-aged married couple, a mistress, and Teacher Wang, a professional “dispeller” hired to discreetly end the affair. The film lives up to its promise of “strikingly intimate access,” which almost feels like an understatement—particularly in the participants’ Chinese sociocultural context, as a matter of saving not just a marriage but also face.
Shortly before Mistress Dispeller had its world premiere in the Orizzonti section of Venice Film Festival, Documentary spoke with Lo over a video call about the film’s unique subject matter, ethical and practical challenges it posed, and its formal qualities that differ from her previous work such as the Hot Docs winner Stray (2020). Mistress Dispeller continues its fall festival run at TIFF and Camden. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
DOCUMENTARY: What drew you to this particular “love industry” in China, i.e., mistress dispelling?
ELIZABETH LO: After making Stray, which took place in Turkey, I knew I wanted to set a film in mainland China as a way to get to know this huge country better that I didn’t know so well, even though I grew up in Hong Kong. I also wanted to challenge myself as a filmmaker and to tell a love story in the nonfiction form because I’ve always loved romance films, but the type of love that I saw in those Hollywood films was different than the love that I experienced in my own life and witnessed within my own family; a love where things are often left unsaid. I was interested in making a portrait of how a woman navigates society through the marginalized perspective of a mistress and looking at what that says about love, family, and the structures that we abide by.
D: How difficult was it to find participants for the film? Did you have other participants who quit at some point?
EL: It was incredibly difficult. At first, I thought that there was no way this could be made in a documentary form because who would allow us into their lives to document that process and that crisis? But when we met Teacher Wang, we knew we had a film there because of the incredible access that she was able to grant us to her clients who all trusted her and eventually trusted us. We worked with her for over two years to cast through her organic pool of incoming clients and finally located Mr. and Mrs. Li, the couple you see in the film. Over those two years, we filmed with five or six other couples at various stages of the mistress dispelling process and some of them would opt to drop out midway through filming.
My producer, Emma Miller, and I were always strategizing about what film we’d be able to make if we couldn’t get the access that we wanted. We were prepared to do a more diffuse approach across different love industries or different cases of mistress dispelling in China. But we always knew that we wanted a very elegant triangle and that that would be the most powerful form the film could take, which takes you through three characters’ perspectives around the same love story.
D: The film starts with an ethical statement that all the participants saw the final cut and agreed to be part of it. Was there some point during production when they realized what the film is actually about? Or was it revealed only at the end?
EL: While deception is inherent to the work of mistress dispelling and Teacher Wang’s methodology, we wanted to be ethical, responsible, and accountable to our participants. With this particular couple, the wife obviously knew what we had hoped our film would be about and what the nature of Teacher Wang’s work is. But the husband and the mistress couldn’t possibly have known. Otherwise, it would’ve disrupted the organic mistress dispelling process and Wang’s work. What we understood is that Wang’s business partner approached the husband and the mistress and asked if they would be willing to participate in a documentary about modern love and dating in China. I think that the husband probably wanted to please his wife by being in the film and that Fei Fei, the mistress, on some level, truly believed that this would be her love story, that she could potentially win at the end.
The collaboration was mostly with Teacher Wang, but it’s more that we allowed her to lead us in her organic process. We did not dictate, orchestrate, or tell the participants what to do or say. In any of the scenes that you see, we never scripted the content or anything like that. The approach is truly observational and not interventionist. We tried to keep our direct communications with the participants to a minimum throughout filming because we did not want to accidentally reveal anything to them. It was only at the end, and this was always part of our ethical strategy, that we showed the film to them so that they could fully grasp what Teacher Wang’s role was in their lives for over three months and asked them if they were okay with their portrayal.
Fortunately, they were and I think it’s a testament to Teacher Wang’s relationship with them. Mr. and Mrs. Li and Fei Fei were so generous and unselfconscious at a level that I feel is almost enlightened. Because I think for most people across the world, and probably especially in China, it’s taboo to air your family’s dirty laundry, also when you’re in such a vulnerable state where either you’re being cheated on or you’re doing the cheating or you’re potentially breaking up a family. I think all three of them somehow, through Teacher Wang’s guidance, were able to see that perhaps sharing their own struggles would help other people who’re struggling privately. I really admire their bravery in general.
D: That answer also helped me understand some parts of the film better. Just like the brilliant scene where Teacher Wang explains to her colleague or student about how her process works.
EL: Yeah. She always told us that if she just burst into a family directly and said, “I’m a couple’s therapist and I’m going to save your marriage,” she would be rejected instantly because therapy is still stigmatized across a lot of China and Asia. That’s why she has to go under disguise to solve these families’ issues.
D: Mistress Dispeller is quite different from your previous films in terms of not only the subject matter but also the stylistic choices. For example, there’s more voiceover narration, direct address to the camera, and very beautifully stylized sequences with eclectic soundtracks. Do you think somehow the subject matter itself necessitated some of these approaches?
EL: Mistress Dispeller was dedicated just to these three characters and they could easily be judged from the outside. I really wanted to use the intimate voiceover as a way to invite you into their inner lives in order for you to hear glimpses of their inner thoughts that might allow you to gain more empathy for what position in life they feel they’re in. It was also partly to combat the sensational premise of the film, which could’ve easily been a spectacle of a strange profession in a distant land. But we did not want the film to just be a shallow procedural of a process. We wanted it to be an examination of love, family, duty, and desire, all these things that everybody grapples with in life.
As for the musical sequences, we begin the film with the sweeping opera that’s at the beginning of A Room with a View and end with the French indie song by Odezenne. The purpose was that we wanted the music to really elevate, heighten, and give gravitas to the emotional journeys that they’re going on. There was easily a way where we could have undercut their experiences with music that poked fun at the phenomenon because it’s so bizarre and strange. But one thing that Charlotte Munch Bengtsen [editor and co-writer] and I really sensed is that we need to protect their stories. Their stories are sacred and we need to make it feel that way for audiences too. We wanted to give their stories and the internal movements within their hearts the same kind of stakes that characters in a Jane Austen novel in the English countryside have. Even though this is a middle-aged Chinese couple in the middle of mainland China, we wanted to treat them with the same level of emotion, whether it’s teen angst from the French indie song, where you feel like you’re in high school, wondering what your expectations of life, hopes, dreams, and love are, or what it feels like to be betrayed in an operatic way after 30 years of marriage.
Amarsanaa Battulga is a Mongolian film critic and PhD student based in Nanjing and Shanghai. His writing has appeared in Cineuropa, Mekong Review, photogénie, among others.