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A love triangle involving a middle-aged couple and a younger woman is exposed and scrutinized from every angle when a professional breakup agent is employed in Elizabeth Lo’s “Mistress Dispeller.”
The Chinese-U.S. documentary, which plays in Venice’s Horizons section, is extraordinary for both the candor of the subjects and the film’s exceptional fly-on-the-wall setup.
The film’s static opening shot, depicting a woman quietly weeping under the dryer as she gets a new hairdo, sets the tone. The second scene, a deflating dinner where the woman tries to probe her husband’s emotional absence — he needs to be prompted about the new coiffure, of course — makes the woman determined to get outside help.
The third scene, when the downhearted woman calls on one of China’s apparently many marriage interventionists to not only do a little detective work, but to also remedy what she has discovered, completes the first act.
What follows is a roundelay of one-on-one meetings in cafes and cars, well-articulated soul bearing (“There is a girl,” admits the husband, Mr. Li) and counseling. The interventionist agent, referred to as “Teacher Wang,” uses deception to befriend both the unwitting husband and his younger girlfriend from another city.
There are no bedroom scenes and no hysterics — it is not even clear that Mr. Li and Zhou Feifei are intimate — but the raw and painful emotions are so thoroughly articulated that at times viewers may need to look away.
Lo, who had previously cast her eye across Turkish society in “Strays,” a film ostensibly about dogs, was keen to examine the position of women in fast-changing China. Unlike centuries-old matchmaking, which Lo’s preparatory research also covered, the mistress dispelling industry is only a decade old, she says.
“What made me decide that this sector could be a film is when we finally met Teacher Wang, because she was able to get her clients to be on camera for us. That was so rare and singular, I felt compelled to make a film that would explore love triangles from all its angles,” Lo said.
Once filming began in 2021, the production endured multiple false starts or dead-ends as several of the participants dropped out. But Lo says that finance was relatively easy to secure.
“Because it’s such an extraordinary and strange logline, and the approach we took subverted any sensationalism, we took a very artful approach that seduced viewers into this world in a respectful and also humorous way, that it was compelling to financiers,” said Lo. “So we were able to raise funds, to go back. And we continued filming for three more years.”
Wang, with her office full of helpers, her dialog that swings between that of a private eye and a guidance counsellor, and her ingenuity, is an undoubtedly fascinating central character. The morality of her actions is debatable.
“I find her work and the level of deception that’s involved in it problematic on a personal level. But, the way she explains it is, if she just came into a family and said, I’m a therapist and I’m going to help you solve your marital problems, she would be rejected. That’s because in China, domestic shame should not be made public,” said Lo. “She needs to use a disguise, because she can’t be direct about it, so there is also a function to what she does.”
Lo added: “Editor [and co-writer] Charlotte Munch Bengtsen and I were very conscientious of wanting to protect our characters, our protagonists, because they had led us into the deepest wounds of their lives … we never, ever directed them what to do or say. And we tried to allow the case to unfold as organically as it could. But, of course, as a documentary filmmaker, you have to acknowledge how the presence of the camera catalyzes change in their behaviors.”
Wang reported back to the filmmakers that the trio presented the best possible versions of themselves. But Lo rightly suggests that the collated and edited footage still has plenty of emotional bite. “I think that dissonance between the best version that they’re performing of themselves and their raw emotions, that distance is fascinating to look at, and to see it slip in front of the camera,” she said. “To use the cinematic idiom, we wanted to give audiences the space to be able to analyze the scenes themselves.”
Between the chapters, Lo’s film also splices in vignettes of faces, landscapes, Chinese cityscapes and companies working in the marriage market. She says these have a contextual value, not a political one.
“They pull out into the macro landscape of China, like the natural landscape that you know this culture is born in, and where these dramas are taking place, and show that we’re just animals looking for connection in a very primal way,” Lo said. “If I’m making a political point, it is not one specific to China. It might be political specific to the world; the way that love and how we connect with one another, the type of world that we live in is so connected to market ideology and the commoditization of relationships.”
The film has its premiere in Venice on Sept. 1. There are currently no plans to release it in China.
Tom Tang
