Mistress Dispeller
(China/USA, 94 min.)
Dir. Elizabeth Lo
Programme: TIFF Docs (North American premiere)
I don’t know what the documentary opposite is of “suspension of disbelief,” but I experienced frequent anxiety when watching Elizabeth Lo’s fascinating film, Mistress Dispeller. I was constantly, even distractingly, worried about how a camera crew was in place to capture what’s shown on screen. It took a more active viewing mode to ignore how things were going on beyond the frame and simply focus on the lives of the subjects, but this proved to be a real struggle throughout.
Mistress Dispeller, in its simplest telling, is the story of a couple. The husband, Mr. Li, is having an affair, and the wife is encouraged to employ the services of Wang Zhenxi, a “mistress dispeller,” or a kind of marital firefighter who brings her guile and experience to quash the fires of a romantic dalliance between the husband and his mistress.
Part intervention, part exercise in encouraging self-delusion, the film dives deeply into these intensely personal aspects of middle-class Chinese life. Just as Lulu Wang’s fictionalized The Farewell illustrated the ways that “good lies” are used to buttress a dying grandmother from the truth of her condition, here we see acts of duplicity and subterfuge employed to revert a paired partnership back to his former regularity, and to encourage the woman who is made to be the third wheel to find another path forward.
There’s a certain dispassionate quietude to it all, a propriety that may or may not be influenced by the camera’s attendance, which is a far cry from the West’s often salacious modes of navigating marital infidelity. Contrasting this film with, say, daytime television tabloid shows, or Real Housewives-ian cacophony, where demonstrative conflict is captivating and screams of betrayal or the smashing of (white) wine glasses is fully expected in its circus-like presentation, may make the events captured by Lo and her crew fully subdued in the Chinese context.
Yet there are boiling social and political elements exposed in between the polite exchanges, drawing upon everything from societal norms regarding restricted speech, to certain systemic attitudes regarding either patriarchy or the position of the woman who got their partner first. This leads to more complex issues such as the lasting legacy of the one-child policy and how that upended the way that gender has long played a dominant factor in so many aspects of rich cultural traditions.
And so, we as an audience are treated to an impressively intimate yet never salacious look at piecing back together what in other contexts would be a completely broken situation. Through patience, perseverance and not a little bit of deceit, we see as Wang finagles husband, wife, and mistress into reshaping the way that they interact with one another. It’s wild to witness, and the way it’s done without explosive moments of hysterical outburst feels all the more surreal given to how we’ve been conditioned to such drama over here.
The result is a probing, profound examination of just what marriage is meant to mean within contemporary China. The film also speaks to another fundamental truth about the unique subtext of these affairs in this nation’s context, for in a land where the gender equality remains massively off balance, the very act of young single women engaging in relationships with unavailable men takes on an entirely different category of behaviour that as deeply political as it is personal.
China is a land of almost a billion surveillance cameras, yet it is Lo’s that feels the most invasive but also the most revealing, a paradoxical balance between the quiet witnessing of these individuals’ truths to the benefits of us as an audience, but also a feeling that we’re seeing stuff that should be worked out in private. Of course, the inclusion of Wang herself, an outsider who comes in to help navigate the reconciliation, is indicative about how interlopers play a role that may not conform with our own preconceptions about what “should” be happening, but also mirroring the benefits, such as they are, of having the camera there to capture it all.
In this way, we’re granted by Lo and her a uniquely subtle look at this process of reconstructing a more socially-acceptable arrangement, but also a captivating and complex dive into the various attitudes and emotions that swirl around these events. Mistress Dispeller settles in at its own pace, but it’s ever engaging, and truly feels to be a unique, powerful, and deeply personal portrait that gets to the heart of something so rarely captured in such an eloquent way.
