As an Asian student in the West in the last decade, Elizabeth Lo used to hear some women there vow a simple solution to infidelity in marriage — ‘If I found out my husband was cheating on me, I would file for divorce.’ Most women in the East would beg to differ, thought Elizabeth, who was born in Hong Kong. It wouldn’t be long before she would discover a burgeoning love industry in China that even offered a new secret cure to a crowded marriage. (Also Read: Why War searches for explanation of savagery of conflicts through Einstein and Freud’s letters: Amos Gitai)
It was the stark difference between love portrayed in Hollywood romances and the love bound up with sacrifice and duty in Asian culture that spurred Elizabeth, now a Hong Kong-based filmmaker, on to her sophomore film, a documentary on the recent Chinese phenomenon of employing a professional to get rid of a third party in marriage.
After nearly three years of intense research and criss-crossing China to understand social change following the rise of the country as a superpower, Elizabeth is now ready to premiere her new film at the 81st Venice Film Festival beginning on August 28.
Part of the Venice festival’s Orizzonti competition representing the latest aesthetic and expressive trends in world cinema, Mistress Dispeller directed by Elizabeth promises to be Asia’s answer to America’s Mr & Mrs Smith, albeit without the bullets, bombs and burning down the house. The film’s production team includes Danish editor Charlotte Munch Bengtsen, who also edited Shaunak Sen’s Oscar-nominated documentary, All That Breathes.
Set in Luoyang, the ancient capital of China and now a tier-three industrial city, the 94-minute film is about a woman hiring a professional to go undercover and break up her husband’s affair to save their marriage. A couple called Mr & Mrs Li negotiate their troubled marriage in Mistress Dispeller, filmed with real characters.
“The mistress dispeller phenomenon has only emerged in the last decade or so with the rise of China,” explains Elizabeth, who studied at New York University Tisch School of the Arts and later at Stanford University for a Master of Fine Arts. “It is sort of the market’s answer to a problem that needs a market demand that needs to be solved for certain people whether it is the wife being cheated on or the husband or the wife trying to get rid of their mistresses or their third parties in a smooth way,” she adds.
“The Chinese economic rise has supposedly led to a rise in infidelity as well. As China opens up, the divorce rates go up as the country enters the middle classes and upper middle classes that had a seismic shift to how the society and family are organised,” says the director, who received a Sundance Institute of Producers Programme grant for the film project.
The love industry claims a success rate of 99 per cent for cases handled by mistress dispellers. “I don’t have the data to back that up, but the mistress dispeller in the film does feel that by the time someone reaches out to her for her services, there is some hope to achieving success.” says Elizabeth, whose debut documentary, Stray, captured the endearing relationship between stray dogs and human beings in Istanbul, Turkey, despite the state’s attempts to get rid of the dogs from the streets for over a century.
The mistress dispeller phenomenon is not purely gendered. The production team, which worked on several possibilities for their project, also filmed — though not used — a male third party who was getting dispelled by the mistress dispeller hired by the husband.
Elizabeth Lo talked to The Hindustan Times ahead of the world premiere of Mistress Dispeller at the Venice Film Festival on September 2. Excerpts from an interview:
What was the point of departure for your new documentary, Mistress Dispeller?
At first I was interested in documenting the way that women navigate their place in Chinese society. That is when I discovered the mistress dispeller phenomenon in China. And I thought mistress dispeller was a very interesting way to look at that. I was interested in using the crisis of infidelity within a marriage as a way to explore how people meet that crisis and how they react to it and what that says about my own culture, how emotion is expressed and how love is lived.
Is mistress dispeller a China-only phenomenon?
Right now it seems mistress dispeller exists only in China. I think part of why this works in China is because so much is predicated on how in Asian cultures you don’t want to say things directly because it would be considered offensive. What you can communicate directly in the West, it would be unthinkable in the East. The mistress dispeller is able to come into a relationship because she works covertly, in disguise. She is able to bring to the surface things that can’t be acknowledged openly and fix the problem while maintaining a facade that everything is okay on the surface. Without publicly acknowledging between the wife and the husband, she is able to fix the issue by breaking up the affair of their own accord without a confrontation taking place necessarily. That may be specific to the Eastern way of handling conflict and confrontation.
When did you first meet Wang Zhenxi, the real-life mistress dispeller in the film?
We met Wang Zhenxi in 2021. She was one of the dozens of mistress dispellers that we met with in China. But she was the only one on the first day of our scouting shoot who was able to get us access to three of her clients — a mistress, a wife and husband — all on the same day. We filmed her and her case as it was already being resolved. I was so moved by that experience to see all three opposing parties of a love triangle gathered together expressing how they felt and why they did what they did, the remorse or nostalgia they felt for a relationship that is lost. I was moved by how my own empathy was moving towards people like the cheater or the mistress disrupting the marriage. I felt like that would be a worthy film, a film that asks you to try to relate to figures that you may find stigmatised or you might have judgment about. For me making films is all about trying to understand why people behave the way they do and that there are larger forces which bear down on our individual choices. And even the way we love and feel we deserve to be loved.
What kind of strategies does a mistress dispeller like Wang Zhenxi have?
She is like a master chess player. She seems to completely understand human nature, how people behave, what next steps they will take, and she orchestrates every step that she takes with her client in figuring a certain response and understanding how to respond to that response. In a way that yields the outcome of her client’s desires in a least destructive way possible. She invests heavily in psychology courses and studies it on her own and uses the strategies of the couples therapists, but in a very practical way.
How does the modern thinking of freedom and independence relate to the mistress dispeller phenomenon?
There is a1956 book called The Art of Loving by (German social psychologist) Eric Fromm I read and informed the way I saw the premise of this whole film. One of his incredible quotes is, ‘If you look at love or the lack of love in any society, you can trace it back to the rise of capitalism and the commodification of every transactional nature of relationships.’ I can see in the wider love industry that we documented throughout China, and I think it is just not in China, but throughout the world in different degrees, love, marriage and the ability to settle down and create a family are so much tied to your economic status, what property you own, and even something as shallow as your height. I think those kinds of issues are affecting people’s ability to find and maintain love. In such a harsh environment, how do you sustain love in middle age given the aging process and temptations within society and the balance in power between genders. All these things affect family life. I don’t have any judgments about it. I am only interested in exploring what it meant for each of these people as they are figuring out this crisis that they are in.
How did you approach the structure and narrative of the film?
I think the way the film is structured is like Rashomon. It is very much inspired by that film by Akira Kurosawa where its characters are going through a time of national change. I think China is also going through a moment of seismic change. You can see in this Rashomon portrait of three people a love triangle and their different perspectives of the same love story that they are all grappling with changes to society in their own individual homes.
I wanted this film to be a deeper meditation of love, family and desire. So I had to choose a form that would encourage viewers and seduce viewers into spaces that would enable them to contemplate what the characters are going through. One of the strategies is that in terms of cinematography we used very long takes, fixed frames that don’t have much movement because we wanted what happens in front of the camera, the conversations that are unfolding, to feel like a play unfolding in the cinematic medium. You can follow the arc of the conversation organically with as little cuts as possible for a long time. Because as humans we are such complex creatures, what we see is not often what we mean, so much is in the reading between the lines. Therefore, by playing an entire conversation, unedited almost — they are real conversations that the camera has captured between two people trying to solve a problem or two people with conflicting desires in front of each other grappling with each other’s needs and trying to meet them — you can see something that is true to life on the screen. I would hope that, because I find when I watch the scenes unfold, every time I watch it I have a different interpretation of what each character’s motivation was meant by one gesture or one line. There is a real joy to that being able to watch something unfold in front of your eyes and have the freedom because of the form of strategies i took that is much more patient and hopefully less editorialised that you can bring your own cultural baggage or your own value systems and bring it into what they are thinking and feeling. And come to your conclusions about what you should do and who loves who and who belongs with who on your own.
How did you choose the production process to the demands of the narrative?
The original concept of the film was that we wanted to have the elegant structure of a love triangle where you really get to know and invest in three characters’ journeys as they sort out their own affair. We were prepared, if we couldn’t get access to people opening their lives to us, for a much more diffuse approach where we would just do a survey of various love industries in China or dipping very shallowly into each of Wang Zhenxi’s work cases. But thankfully we were able to work with Wang Zhenxi. It took over a year to cast the couple, Mr & Mrs Li, and the mistress Fei Fei. The wife knew what the film was about. The husband and mistress couldn’t have known from the beginning. Otherwise the workflow wouldn’t work. In terms of the production process, we followed the case for a few months from beginning to end. We also travelled across China not only filming the love industry vignettes but also natural landscapes that we used to integrate into the film as a rhythmic reprieve from the very talk-heavy domestic scenes so that they could function as breathers for the audience and also to situate the audience and characters within the natural landscape of China in which this culture is born.
How do you react to the recent attempts in Turkey to get rid of street dogs in relation to your documentary, Stray, on the same in 2020?
Cities without stray dogs are inhumane. It is so natural that stray dogs should live among us. I discovered Turkey had this incredible relationship with stray dogs where for the last 100 years the state has tried to get rid of the dogs from the streets, but because people have this deep attachment to the street dog culture they protested against the government’s culling attempts. So stray dogs have thrived for 100 years on Turkey’s streets. In Turkey, maybe in India too, dogs, by being able to be free and having the right to exist on the streets, have been able to live their lives on their own terms. I feel sad now the film almost feels like a time capsule because of what is happening to the dogs in Turkey now. Like there is this brief window in time when there was harmony and now it is being destroyed. I hope that they will bounce back again.
Have you been to India? Do you think a mistress dispeller could work in Indian culture too?
I recently went to Mumbai for a friend’s Indian wedding. It was a wonderful event. I feel all weddings should be in the Indian style. I have a feeling mistress dispeller might work in India given the parallel systems of family and collective good.
What is your next project?
I want to challenge myself as a storyteller living through this era of climate catastrophe, in some ways grappling with it in a film. I don’t know what approach I would take. But I feel it is essential to somehow deal with it.
