The Chinese love industry’s intricacies come to life in Elizabeth Lo’s latest documentary, “Mistress Dispeller.” Lo and her team meticulously documented the relationship of Mr. and Mrs. Li, a married couple entangled in infidelity, and their return to the monogamy of married life.
A far cry from Lo’s 2020 film “Stray,” which followed the life of a stray dog in Istanbul, the wrenching intimacy of real life captured in “Mistress Dispeller” brings the vulnerable underbelly of marriage in China into mainstream conversation.
Hailing from Hong Kong, Lo and her team followed a real-life “mistress dispeller,” Teacher Wang, as she worked with couples across the Henan province. Lo shared her personal experiences making the film with Golden Gate Xpress.
Interview
(Here are the edited excerpts from our conversation.)
Palacio: Despite being a documentarian experience, there’s a lot of artistry behind [“Mistress Dispeller.”]
Lo: Thank you so much for noticing that. All of us are really inspired by cinema and our references went from Chantal Akerman to Wong Kar-Wai to even Tolstoy. We really tried to pull from all of those great artists before us to try to find the best way to approach this love story that was real.
Palacio: It’s a really careful curation, from the blow drying of the hair to using badminton to represent their battles. I’m reading way too much into it as a film person, watching a documentary.
Lo: I love that. That was all organic. Their lives and their story, but then the poetry emerges through the editing.
Palacio: Your editors’ and your vision were very clear to me, and I hope the rest of your viewers as well. Everyone gets their own intention out of it. How did you find out about the phenomenon of mistress dispellers in the first place?
Lo: I’m originally from Hong Kong. I grew up there. My first film was “Stray,” which took place in Turkey, and it explored the city of Istanbul through the perspective of a stray dog. That was such a revelatory experience, and I knew that I wanted my next film to be set in mainland China, because it’s both a country that is vast and unknown to me as someone from Hong Kong but also very close to my roots. As I was researching, I rewatched Zhang Yimou’s “Raise the Red Lantern,” which is this incredible film set in 1920s China, where a young woman marries into a wealthy patriarch’s home as the fourth wife, and she has to compete with three other wives for his affection. I wanted to transpose that premise to modern-day China to ask the question, “What is it like to be a woman navigating society today?” I started researching about mistresses in China and came across the mistress dispelling phenomenon, which has only cropped up in the last 10 years. I hadn’t been aware of it before, and I thought this could only be a fiction film, but once I worked with our China-based producer Maggie Li, we were able to meet with dozens of real mistress dispellers in China. Teacher Wang was the only one who got us access to a husband, wife and mistress who were all entangled and part of the same case to be on camera. Subsequently, we followed her for three more years, filming with at least six other cases before we arrived and got the access that we did with Mr. and Mrs. Li, who are in the film.
Palacio: When you were looking at these couples from the outside, who was your ideal audience?
Lo: It was just people who have experienced love, who have struggled in love, who have connected and missed connections, who’ve experienced betrayal, who’ve failed at relationships, who have been in successful relationships and done the hard work to make them work. Our audience is anyone who’s ever been in love or fell short in love. I found that to be really relatable, and what our characters are going through — it’s super universal while also being culturally specific to China. I knew, going into this film, to set a film in mainland China as a Hong Kong citizen, as someone who grew up outside of the U.S, I knew that I didn’t want to make a film that would further alienate, especially Western audiences from China. Because there’s so much anti-China sentiment already in the air that I knew that whatever subject matter I picked, it would become a bridge. I feel like love and how we struggle in love was a great way to achieve that bridge.
Palacio: What role does consent play in this film? Not only between a husband, a wife and a mistress, but between the act of filming and publicizing this phenomenon?
Lo: Consent was a huge aspect of making this film that we were hyper-cognizant of as we embarked on this seemingly impossible premise. My producer, Emma Miller, and I, we always wanted to authentically document a case from beginning to end. Deception is so inherent in Teacher Wang’s work. The husband and the mistress in this particular case that appears in the film, they couldn’t have known what the film was. They couldn’t have known Teacher Wang’s role in their lives because that’s how she works. They were approached to be in a film more broadly about modern love in China. That’s what they had agreed to participate in. In the course of the four months that we filmed with them, we always knew at the end of the process [that] we would travel back to China and show them the cut of the film, so that they could fully grasp what the mistress dispeller’s real role was in their lives. In that moment, they would have the opportunity to either re-consent to being a part of the project, which we obviously hoped for, or they could drop out. There were couples that dropped out in the course of the three years that we were filming. We always respected that because no film is worth jeopardizing someone’s life if there’s no real consent there.
Palacio: What were some of the most difficult aspects to witness? Did you ever feel a primal instinct to intervene or want to speak up?
Lo: I never felt the instinct to intervene because the stakes were not physical. There’s no harm that would come to these participants working through their emotional struggles. In other films, I’ve felt the need to intervene because I think filmmakers are not objective bystanders, but in this case, the stakes are not as high as life or death or real harm. When we were filming, sometimes the way people behave in front of the camera was baffling, even to me. There were scenes that I filmed with husbands who were in one scene denying that they were having an affair, to their wife, and then in the next scene, with me there as the cinematographer, making a move on his mistress in front of me as I’m recording it. In those instances, I really couldn’t understand what was going on in the participant’s head. In that case, we made choices in the edit not to include stories like that because that was not the story we wanted to tell as artists and storytellers. We were interested in a Rashomon-style film in which you feel empathy for the husband, wife and mistress. We really focused on finding people who were trying their best despite the circumstances they’re in. We really felt it was our responsibility that even though in the field, people sometimes overexposed themselves. It was our job to protect them in the edit and not reveal so much that the audiences would feel negatively about them, because that was never our intention with that film.
Palacio: It’s really painful to have to explore a completely different option when you’ve gone through this entire documentarian process of following a couple and following their mistress dispeller, learning their story and really embedding yourself in it as a filmmaker. How many couples did you follow that process with before finding the Lis?
Lo: We filmed with at least six other cases. Some of those couples lent to a more juicy and salacious storyline, but as our North Star, we wanted our audiences’ compassion to stretch to places that they wouldn’t have expected. We knew that to do that. The film had to express through the lives of the participants that we chose to feature, people trying their best by the circumstances.
“Mistress Dispeller” is out now in select Bay Area theaters.
