“We should talk about anything, except emotions,” Teacher Wang says to someone as she goes about her work in “Mistress Dispeller,” a guiding principle to running a business of finding practical resolutions for her clients’ matters of the heart. Part of a growing underground industry in China where marriages are saved by investigations into infidelity and the third party is gracefully shown the door by the hired hand so the husband and wife need not get their hands dirty, Teacher Wang slips into one tortured couple’s situation after another, usually calming a wife’s frazzled nerves, keeping a husband with a wandering eye’s focus squarely on her and offering some incentive to the person in the middle that they will be better off elsewhere in a society where the financial stability of a marriage is difficult to come by.
Teacher Wang may have become a master of keeping people’s emotions in check as she untangles fraught relationships, but director Elizabeth Lo stirs up any number of them in following her for her dazzling second feature, honing in on one particular couple – Mr. and Mrs. Li, who enlist the Mistress Dispeller’s services after the latter believes her husband is sneaking about with a young woman named Fei Fei and Teacher Wang, posing as a friend of Mrs. Li’s brother, finds that Mr. Li may be just as eager as his wife for him to end the affair when the initial excitement of an illicit relationship has faded. After bringing out the personality of dogs across Turkey for her beloved debut feature “Stray,” Lo observes behavior that may be even more wild as the trio Teacher Wang engages all feel compelled to hold on dearly to what they have while determining how much they want to pursue their true desires where economic comfort and romantic satisfaction are both strong considerations.
It may be remarkable that Lo gains access to such a deeply personal conundrum as Mr. And Mrs. Li face, but somehow it may be even more so how the filmmaker brings the context to understand their otherwise irrational or potentially outrageous decisions about how to move forward and would make a mediator like Teacher Wang meddling in their affairs necessary. As Lo surveys a modern China that resembles the old British class system as far as economic mobility is concerned when young women such as Fei Fei have limited options for employment but courier services and her romantic life seems ruled over by apps as well, it seems appropriate that the director fashions a film about romantic unions as buoyant and rich as any of the great Jane Austen novels. After premiering this time last year at the Venice Film Festival and celebrated at various stops on the festival circuit since, “Mistress Dispeller” is now arriving in theaters where its resplendent cinematography and crowd pleasing twists and turns are best appreciated and Lo graciously took the time to talk about the film’s five-year journey to the screen and the influence of other films and novels in making sense of such a grand and singular story as the one that unfolded before her lens.
What got you interested in this?
After “Stray,” which took place in Turkey and was so revelatory to experience a new culture completely foreign to my own, I knew that I wanted to use my second feature-length documentary as a way to explore mainland China, a culture and country that is both foreign and obviously deeply close to me as someone from Hong Kong. So I was searching for stories that took place in mainland China, and I knew that I would love to tell a love story in the nonfiction form. I watched Zhang Yimou’s “Raise the Red Lantern” in the course of my research, and I’d seen it years ago, but I was so struck [now] by the question that it posed of what is it like to navigate society as a woman? That film is about four women who are competing for the affections of a wealthy patriarch in 1920s China, and I thought it would be really interesting to transpose that premise to modern-day China.
So as I was searching for stories about mistresses in China, I came across the mistress dispelling phenomenon, and even in just one afternoon of scouting with Teacher Wang and the encounter with her clients, I was moved by all three perspectives of a love triangle and seeing her work with her clients, that changed my focus — [I realized this] wasn’t going to just be about the emotional lives of women, but it would be inclusive of everybody involved in a love triangle, and what that says about family and love and the choices that we make in life. The mistress dispelling process brought those things to light.
I’ve heard that you interviewed a number of mistress dispellers before finding Teacher Wang. What led her to be who you’d want to follow?
Yeah, a lot of other mistress dispelling companies that we interviewed with and scouted used tactics that sometimes bordered on illegal. They used tactics of intimidation and blackmail, but Teacher Wang was the one mistress dispeller who didn’t use any of those tactics. Her approach was much more therapeutic and she utilized soft power in her cases. Because of her methodology, she was able to maintain trust with her clients, including the mistresses, so she had this remarkable ability to give us access to all three parties of a love triangle in a way that no other mistress dispellers could, at least of the ones we met. And on day one of scouting, she already got us access to a husband and wife and mistress at the tail end of a mistress dispelling case and convinced them to be on camera.
Once that happened — [and] she achieved the impossible — I [felt] there’s a film worth pursuing here, especially because I could feel in that one afternoon, my empathy was expanding to the cheating husband and the mistress who is fracturing this family, which I did not expect at all. I felt my compassion stretch to places I wasn’t comfortable with, and initially, I wanted audiences to undergo that same expansion of compassion and that felt like a meaningful exercise to pursue. Hopefully, by sticking with Miss Wang, we would be able to find a story that did that.
From what I understand, you were actually a few years into filming when that happened, but I’m guessing that wasn’t time wasted. How did the early work contribute to the film as a whole?
Yeah, those three years definitely were not wasted, even though it was very high ratio of shooting to what ends up in the film. It was actually the wife’s little brother, who’s in the film and who had actually been a male mistress himself and was getting dispelled by teacher Wang at the time, so because of him and our preexisting experience with him, when his older sister came to him and said, “My husband is cheating on me. What do I do?” He proposed to her that to participate in our documentary because he had a good experience with us and also that teacher Wang would make her problem go away because he awoke to the fact that teacher Wang’s job was to dispel mistresses, essentially.
That preexisting trust that was established two years prior to production with Mrs. Li, the wife, was what gave us the kind of access that we finally got with this couple that’s in the film, which we didn’t get with any of the other couples. There were couples that we filmed with in those three years where the husband was behaving in ways that felt so inexplicable to me. One hour, they would deny in front of the camera to the wife that he’s having an affair and within the next hour, with me still present and the camera there, making a move on his mistress. In situations like that where I couldn’t make sense of the choices that these protagonists were making, it felt so unrelatable that despite it being a juicier scene, that was not the story we wanted to tell.
We wanted to tell a tender love story in which you could really try to root for all three of these people who are just trying their best despite the circumstances they’re in. So finally when we arrived at Mr. and Mrs. Li and Fei Fei, they were all decent people and they may be making mistakes, they may be poor at communication, but they’re trying. That’s the story that we wanted to tell, as opposed to one where people were behaving in ways that completely defied any kind of moral compass.
The visual style of this is so striking, and from what I understand, you would often leave the camera unattended. What was it like to develop an aesthetic that was conscientious to what actual emotions would be going on in a scene?
In the research phase and pre-production, I was watching tons and tons of films. That included Chantal Akerman’s “Jeanne Dielman,” which was a real reference point for holding these long take fixed framed shots within domestic settings in kitchens where you’re really allowing women’s stories to take up space and giving them the gravitas that her film affords. So I was taking this approach with these tabletop conversations in which Wang is dissecting relationships and trying to get her clients to where she wants them to go. And then Wong Kar Wai was obviously a reference in the lushness and the shots of wilderness that populate the film. It takes these human dramas into an existential place where in the wilderness, we are all primal beings searching for connection, affection and opportunities for procreation, and finding disconnection in those larger societal vignettes where you’re seeing love as commoditized and it’s tied to your age as a woman or to whether you have a mortgage as a man. We really wanted it to be about humans and how they love and why they love in the ways that they do and why they can’t connect also, so the thinking behind how the cinematography would serve the story was to take this premise beyond what could have been a very shallow and juicy procedural of the mistress to [what is a] strange love industry in China.
The structure of this in terms of these indoor scenes with the love triangle and the outdoor scenes with the broader love industry in China was really elegant and effective at giving the bigger picture. Was it difficult to figure out?
We knew that the most elegant structure that the film could take would be [similar to] “Rashomon,” where you’re moving between perspectives from the wife to the husband to the mistress, but during production, we didn’t know whether we would ever get the kind of access and completion of a case in the ways that we hoped to. We also filmed with many different love industries as a backup plan, if we failed to get access, or [because we] gave the participants the opportunity to reconsent at the end once they’ve discovered what the mistress dispeller’s true role was in their lives. We could ethically give them the option to drop out because we had this wealth of material of other industries that we could pivot to, so it’s a combination of practical film planning that made us go out and get [the footage of] these love industries. But once we had gotten them, we knew that it would be interesting to play with the expansion and contraction between the core love story and the larger environment that they are living in.
In terms of the pacing of the film, I remember watching Hang Sang-soo movies at the time and timing how long his conversations lasted to see what feels long in cinematic time and what feels ordinary. That was a real reference because I always knew Teacher Wang’s work takes place over these tabletops for hours, I was always fascinated by seeing the way that she pulled strings and it would elicit a reaction 10 steps down the line and it would get her clients exactly where she wanted them to be. But I wanted audiences to have the pleasure and privilege of also being able to witness that with as minimal cuts as possible to the footage so that you could believe in the authenticity despite the impossibility of this documentary premise.
Working with Charlotte Munch Bengtsen, this incredible editor, we figured out the rhythm that we would take with the pacing and when we would expand into the larger environment. “Anna Karenina” was a great reference too as I was thinking about how do you deepen these characters’ stories. Even though we’re only filming with them for four months, [I would think about] how do you get at their background, their upbringing, their environment, which are all informing the choices that they’re making on an individual basis, so that expansion into the larger society was somewhere we were really drawing from the way Tolstoy expands into society beyond his primary characters.
When Teacher Wang does have this unseen hand in pulling strings, was it difficult to figure out what her presence would be in the film as a character?
Yeah, there was a version of the film that could have had Wang as the central character and you’re dipping in and out of different cases that we filmed with, but you’re not getting in as deep with our clients. But what we found is that Wang is constantly on. She’s constantly an actress in her life. Her mask is never off, so she doesn’t reach the same level of vulnerability as her clients and it made her less compelling on screen. Also something that we noticed in the edit is that if we overshared the mistress dispelling process in which she’s instructing our clients what to do A to B, and then you see them executing her plan directly, the tension was sucked out of the film. So [we wanted] you to pull the scheme together in your mind by guessing what is orchestrated by her and what is organic to the protagonists themselves and in between where you’re having to figure out the strings yourself, and maybe you have to rewatch it to figure out what strings were pulled by her or not and that would be a more interesting and active experience for audiences.
Just one reason of many that I’d want to watch this movie again. Was there any dimension to the story you really didn’t expect as you were putting this together?
Yeah, as I mentioned at first, Zhang Yimou’s “Raise the Red Lantern” planted the seed for the idea and I thought it would be in a journey through the lives of women and how they negotiate society. But what we were able to achieve through Wang’s work and her closeness with her clients, including the husbands, was this journey that allowed us to peer into what a man’s psyche is too as he’s transgressing. I was really moved by how they embark on what I think are these really classically heroic journeys where they cross thresholds and they come back with the elixir. The wife has to set aside her pride in order to save her family, and some people might judge that, but I really admire her restraint. And the husband is at this fork in the road where he has to either choose his duty and love for his family and the oath that he made to his wife versus the happiness that he was deriving from his desire for Fei Fei, and then Fei Fei having to learn her own self-worth to be able to extricate herself from an extramarital affair. I really admire them for the journeys that they went on, even if they were prompted and forced to by the mistress dispeller.
What’s it been like to travel with the film?
It was always my dream to be able to travel with a film like this to see what cultural baggage audiences from different parts of the world bring to this film. It’s been so interesting to see the way Western audiences question the characters’ decisions versus Asian or Eastern audiences [where] it seems like it’s completely understandable why the characters are behaving in the ways that they do. In the West, sometimes I’ll get questions like, “Why did the husband choose to not leave his marriage? And it’s so interesting to see the ways in which an individualistic culture where the pursuit of your own personal happiness is paramount, how that is contrasted with Eastern cultures where the collective good and the fabric of family is so much more prioritized than your personal sense of contentment. Also, that difference in conflict resolution that in Asian cultures [where the instinct is] to not be directly confrontational, to allow everybody to save face and preserve their dignity, at least on the surface, there’s something really beautiful about it too, even though it’s so different than the Western way in which confrontation and accountability is much more overt. Seeing that contrast in audience reactions and being able to theorize about the differences has been really fascinating for me.
“Mistress Dispeller” opens on October 22nd in New York at the IFC Center, October 24th in Los Angeles at the Monica Film Center and the Laemmle NoHo 7 and October 31st in San Francisco at the Roxie Theater before expanding. A full list of theaters and dates is here.