Mistress Dispeller is a beautiful and poetic documentary about love in contemporary China, portraying how a professional “mistress dispeller” is hired to break up an extramarital affair. The profession might be unique to China, but the emotions and struggles experienced by those involved in the love triangle must be shared by many across the globe.
★★★★☆ 4.5/5
Dir. Elizabeth Lo
China, United States of America | 2024 | 94m | Mandarin Chinese
The love between a middle-aged couple is dying. One day, the wife discovers that her husband has been cheating on her. She hires a professional “mistress dispeller” to break up the affair, and the dispeller does her job. This might sound like an idea for a fiction film; perhaps this is why a fellow cinephile I met in Venice thought all along that Mistress Dispeller was a mockumentary until I told him otherwise. Remarkably, Hong Kong-born filmmaker Elizabeth Lo managed to film a documentary that follows the above plot, featuring all three involved in the love triangle – the wife, the husband, and the mistress – in addition to the mistress dispeller.
Most people immediately sympathise with the one being cheated on upon hearing a cheating story. Indeed, the first part of the film focuses on the perspective of the wife who discovers that her husband is cheating, inviting the audience to feel sorry for this woman who still wants to save her marriage despite her husband’s affair. But the film does not end there. It switches to share the husband’s perspective: through conversations between him and the professional mistress dispeller (who, all along, pretends to be a friend of the wife who happens to learn of the affair), the film allows its audience to understand what the husband thinks. Caught between his desire to keep his marriage and the excitement he gets from the younger mistress whom he secretly meets, the feeble husband is unable to choose one woman over the other, which allows room for the mistress dispeller to steer him away from the affair. In a spectacular fashion, the film goes on to show the perspective of the mistress: she, like many others, is simply a lonely soul in a big city longing for love, and it happens that the husband in the story is the one who can show her care. She is no evil person who deliberately tries to disrupt the harmony of a family; she merely wants to have her own relationship. It is unbelievable that the director managed to convince all four people involved – the husband, the wife, the mistress, and the dispeller – to appear in the documentary, let alone film them sharing their most private thoughts. This is no coincidence but the result of hard work. In the post-screening Q&A on 2 September in Venice, the producer, Emma D. Miller, shared that the crew filmed several other couples and other aspects of the love industry in China, such as a dating camp for single men and matchmaking companies. The final film features only one case handled by the mistress dispeller, but what lies behind the excellent work are, surely, many hours of raw footage obtained through dedication and patience.
The fourth wall is only broken when the film nearly ends, during a meeting between the wife and the mistress. Hitherto, the film often shows dialogues between the characters unfold naturally, which gives a feeling that what is being shown is too real to be filmed in a documentary. The trick which made this possible is, as the director shared in the same Q&A, to leave a camera in the room and let the characters talk without the film crew’s presence. The director shared that when shooting this film, she was inspired by Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975), which has a static camera that elevates domestic spaces and female stories. The resulting film is very poetic, with occasional shots showing natural scenery, as if suggesting that the emotions and struggles the audience sees in the film are all-natural, all part of what makes us human. After the affair ends, the mistress says that she has taken love from the husband, but now she is returning it to the wife. What a poetic summary of what has happened: a cycle of love in our cycle of life. The emotions of the characters in this film are something that everyone who has experienced love, and hate, can relate to across cultures. Thus, while this is a story unique to China, at the same time, it also speaks to people outside of China. Like Trois Amies (2024), Emmanuel Mouret’s fiction film in competition in Venice this year, Mistress Dispeller is a brilliantly executed work that speaks to love in our contemporary world through love triangles; the only difference is that Mistress Dispeller is a documentary, an exceptional one, truthfully recording a saga of love that once played out in China.
