This interview was originally published on Film Obsessive.

Elizabeth Lo’s Mistress Dispeller had its world premiere at the 2024 Venice International Film Festival and, a year later, the film is making the theatrical rounds. One could say, though, that the story of the documentary started about ten years ago, when the profession of “mistress dispeller” began to crop up in China. This relatively young career exists to break up extramarital affairs and preserve relationships. Lo has thought about why mistress dispelling has become such a popular career.

“Obviously, infidelity is a universal phenomenon,” Lo begins. “I think the emergence of mistress dispelling within China itself has to do with multiple factors. First of all, I think therapy is still very much stigmatized in most parts of Middle China.”

“I've asked the mistress, why can't you just insert yourself within these marriages that are obviously struggling and be open about the fact that you're here to help their relationship? She said that, in China, the sentiment that domestic shame should not be made public is so strong that to reveal their private issues to a professional stranger, she would get ejected immediately under the identity of a therapist.”

“However, if she inserts herself as under a covert identity, as a long-lost friend of the wife or poses as being part of their organic circles, somehow there is a built-in trust where it doesn't feel like you're revealing your dirty laundry to someone who's a complete stranger to your life,” Lo continues. “That's partly why the mistress has to work with deception as part of her methodology.”

“Secondly, I think in Asian culture there’s this need to preserve face and allow even those you're in conflict with the grace to preserve their dignity. I think that's really important, to know how Asian societies deal with conflict resolution in a much more roundabout way than Western societies, where they might come out with guns blazing. They’re holding people accountable or directly confronting people, for better or for worse. Whereas, in Asian culture, there's much more tendency to go in an indirect, roundabout, pragmatic, and subdued way. That's part of why mistress dispelling works there. Not to say that it's not scalable internationally, because I'm sure there would be a demand throughout the world for a service like this, but in particular, it's developed in China because of these qualities. That's my working theory, anyway.”

Mistress Dispeller is an observational documentary centered on Teacher Wang, a mistress dispeller in China, and one of her cases. According to Lo, Teacher Wang would have at least one hundred cases coming and going throughout a year. It took Lo and her team a few tries to find a case where they were able to film all sides of the equation. Throughout the course of the documentary, we get to know Mr. Li and Mrs. Li, a married couple who are going through a rough patch. Mr. Li is secretly seeing a woman named Fei Fei, so Mrs. Li hires Teacher Wang.

“Out of those hundred yearly cases, there were probably one or two that were willing to let us film,” recalls Lo. “For three years, we filmed with six other couples, some of which we couldn't get the full love triangle access or we came in in the middle of the process or the beginning, but they dropped out at the end.”

“Mr. Li, Mrs. Li, and Fei Fei were the only ones we really got that level of deep access from beginning to end and agreed to stay, even after they reviewed the film. We traveled back to China to give them the opportunity to either re-consent to being a part of the project or drop out after they fully grasped Teacher Wang's role in their lives. That’s something we afforded everybody because deception was involved at the beginning and in part of the love triangle.”

“The husband and the mistress couldn't have known what the film was about initially in order for us to authentically capture the process,” explains Lo. “At the end, once they knew, we had to allow them the grace to bow out if they wanted to. Thankfully, they didn't.”

One of the circumstances that likely helped the trio make their decision was the condition from Lo and her team that the documentary would not be publicly released in China. It’s a condition that Lo had set from the beginning, regardless of the couple they ultimately selected to follow.

“I think that allowed them to be as comfortable and as unselfconscious as they were within the film itself. Also, from a production standpoint, what might have made them more comfortable was that we were never in the room. Most of those scenes that you see are very sensitive and we didn't know how they would unfold. We had cameras on sticks recording without us being there so they could be as comfortable as possible, despite knowing they were being filmed.”

With documentaries, especially one as intimate as this, there’s always concern about the relationship and the ethics between filmmaker and subject. How do you maintain respect and care when there’s an inherent discrepancy of power?

“What was interesting about this particular project is that, by its nature, we didn't want to intervene at all or interrupt Teacher Wang's work as a mistress dispeller. She actually wanted us to keep a distance from her clients so we wouldn't, over those four months that we were filming with those cases, spill the beans, reveal too much information, or inadvertently change the course of events just through our relationship.”

“We never had any heart-to-hearts throughout production. We were always very friendly on set, but we never had intense baring of souls with each other in the ways you might on another film set,” Lo explains. “They were so kind to us. Mrs. Li carved wooden earrings for Maggie, my producer. Even though we weren't having those heart-to-hearts throughout those four months, we still developed this really friendly and comfortable rapport with them.”

“I think part of that is because all of us entered into this premise knowing that we wanted to compassionately portray all three of them within this love triangle. People can sense that intention and can sense that we didn't have judgment as we came into the project and toward them. I don't think your intention is something you can hide.”

“At the end, with their master interviews, that's really when we had our heart-to-hearts with them. We asked each of them why they decided to participate. It was Fei Fei's answer that really stuck with me the most. She said that she initially believed the film was a gift from the husband to her, that it would be a document of her love story in which she was the central character, and that she stuck with it because she herself wanted to find out what would happen next.”

“I think a large part of her did not believe the relationship would end, because I think they did have a strong and deep bond on some level off-camera that we weren't able to see prior to our arrival. That was always really poignant to me.”

For many people, the presence of infidelity is a relationship ender. Little compassion is rarely ever extended to the “other woman.” Mistress Dispeller is different in that regard. The documentary doesn’t make a case for excusing or accepting infidelity, but it does present all sides of this love triangle on equal footing. Those who come into the film looking for something salacious, maybe more along the lines of the Real Housewives franchise, won’t find it in Mistress Dispeller. Instead, they’ll find an intimate examination of the intricacies of a series of relationships.

“On that first day of scouting with Teacher Wang, I filmed the tail end of a case where I saw a husband, a wife, and a mistress in sessions with her, as you see in the film. In this case, the husband was crying, really sobbing in front of Teacher Wang. I felt my heart leap out to him. That was so unexpected to me because it's this cheating man.”

“That experience was something I wanted to replicate for audiences. I wanted people to feel curious and not feel judgmental about all three angles of a love triangle. To understand why people are behaving in the ways they are, even if they have shortcomings and have made mistakes.”

“Secondly, working with my editor, who's really brilliant, Fei Fei, who had edited All That Breathes and Truffle Hunters, these incredible documentaries. What we became really conscious of in the edit was that people really tended to over-reveal and overshare themselves in the field. They allowed us to record so much about them, and we really took it upon ourselves to protect them in the edit. To not expose them in ways that would undermine our desire to connect with them.”

“That was something we were really conscious of in the edit. Protecting their dignity and affording them the grace that they are decent people trying their best, despite the circumstances they're in. If you extend the footage by one minute this way or that way, it can completely change an audience's perception of these characters. That was something we were very mindful of.”

Mistress Dispeller’s opening scene lays the emotional groundwork for these people we’re about to meet. The film opens with Mrs. Li in a salon chair, getting a haircut. We see a tear or two fall from her eyes, yet she remains stoic. In the penultimate scene in the documentary, we return to a salon, but this time with Fei Fei. It’s a full-circle moment that speaks to Mistress Dispeller’s themes of aging.

“That first shot you see in the film, where she's crying in the mirror, that was day one of our shoot with her,” recounts Lo. “Before we had established any kind of bond. I think she was in that moment, probably reflecting about why a film crew is in her life. The circumstances upon which she's invited this crew into her life, in which she's been betrayed by the love of her own life. Once I got that shot, I was like, well, it would be incredible to also see the mistress and the husband in a similar moment of reflection. Where you're staring into the mirror as somebody is caring for you, grooming you, and trying to make you look like your best self.”

“There's this striving that I think is really tender. It also offers reflection about the surface of your own face, the stage of life you're in, and how you're feeling. I love the symmetry that the film begins with the wife and it almost ends with Fei Fei as she is being slowly dispelled. It was really important to us that in the very final scene, we return to the wife and the husband who are the heart of the story. It's about their journey of how they have managed or haven't managed to struggle through keeping their love alight.”

So where does this leave us now, as the world is in the midst of a loneliness epidemic? How are we finding emotional, romantic connections when it’s all happening through swipes on a phone screen? In the grand scheme of it all, how does a mistress dispeller play a role in our understanding of love?

“What you're pinpointing is correct, and it's highlighted in the footage in China, where you see the parental marriage markets. Someone's desirability as a spouse is tied to whether they've been divorced or whether they have a mortgage or not. In the marriage matchmaking scene, there’s the telephone matchmakers who are saying, your daughter's value is still high because she still has her youth. Implying that it will go down as she ages.”

“It’s terrifying to live in a world in which we're measured in this way,” Lo continues. “I was reading this book called The Art of Loving by Erich Fromm, and he has this statement that I feel contains the seed of what I was trying to express through these vignettes of love industries that show the isolation of modern love and courtship. He says that when people are commoditized, your love is tied with this market ideology. That's when we fail to connect, and that makes it impossible to love each other.”

“Actually, what makes us human is this deep need to connect with each other. Love is there. It's just factors around us that are preventing us from being able to connect as deeply as we would.”

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