TIFF '24: "Mistress Dispeller" pours ice water over heated marital melodrama

by Cláudio Alves

Elizabeth Lo's latest documentary has one hell of a premise. In modern-day China, a middle-class, middle-aged couple is going through a commonplace crisis we've seen portrayed in cinema a thousand times before. Mr. Li is having an affair with a younger woman, becoming increasingly distant from his spouse. Faced with heartbreak, Mrs. Li won't take the situation with the resigned acquiescence of a long-suffering wife. She categorically refuses to. And here's where Mistress Dispeller takes an odd turn, for the jilted spouse hires the titular professional, Wang Zhenxi, who specializes in the dissolution of such affairs.

Infiltrating the family as a distant relative, the mistress dispeller spends months investigating and reconstructing a broken bond. And somehow, Lo's camera is always there to watch it unfold…

Sometimes, while watching non-fiction cinema, one can find themselves questioning the integrity of what's on screen. Or, at the very least, how much the camera's intervention, its very presence, has shaped the situation and every player's behavior. Mistress Dispeller practically puts forward such inquiries unprompted, never pretending to be a fly-on-the-wall nor falling into documentary clichés like talking head interviews and the like. What it does is underline the mediated nature of the images, emphasizing careful composition and the kind of precise blocking that's rare even in the realm of contemporary narrative cinema.

Every shot in Mistress Dispeller drips intentionality, often using the widescreen aspect ratio to open chasms between folks existing in relative proximity. Conversation pieces become studies of the psychological distance between subjects, the invisible made visible by the camera's careful placement. But that's not all, for even the oft-dismissed establishing shot is presented with a flair for the theatrical. The viewer's arrival at the broken domesticity of the Li family comes with a soaring drone shot scored to opera, a flight through the city in search of the right apartment building. Their windows gleam like rainbow gemstones in a black diamond night, mesmerizing on the verge of kitsch.

But then it cuts straight into the miserable mundanity of a wife trying to get her husband's attention and him paying her no mind. Neither to her, the background radio opera wheezing its music to nobody's pleasure, or the new haircut she had just done. In this and other passages, it's as if Lo were exulting the audiovisual mechanisms of grand drama to invert them, undercut, and vivisect. It's further a study in self-presentation, how one is led to curate an image of happiness that's as false as can be, all strong signifiers signifying nothing. It's a wedding portrait shoot where every smile is a calculated deception. We're meant to consider the creation of meaning in these marriages of sight and sound, to interrogate the alchemy wherein.

Much of Mistress Dispeller works these alchemic games, taking on the soap opera scenario of an extramarital affair, then finding ways to divest it of melodrama and shapeshift its precepts into odd new forms. It practically throws a bucket of ice-cold water over the expected hot-headed infight and is constantly on the lookout for the systematization of the personal and the private. In some fascinating sequences, it goes further still, depicting marriage proposals strung about on the public square, looking like dirty laundry as much as public ads. In this environment, there's no aspect of life that's not heavily commodified, and even the concept of marital happiness exists as part of someone's business plan.

That's not to say Mistress Dispeller is a cold dispassionate look at its central story, ready to dismiss feelings to better grasp the industry built around these interpersonal conundrums. Indeed, Lo and Wang's approaches are remarkably empathetic, eager to listen to all sides of the issue and explore the needs underlying the love triangle turmoil. Such care also leads the documentary toward some strange tonal transformations, often in the space of a single scene. The first meeting between a jilted wife and the adultery specialist breaks into laughter when the woman can't help but compliment what she most prizes about her husband, rancor hand-in-hand with genuine appreciation. Even as a theater for the camera, there's value to these moments.

Still, Mistress Dispeller only fulfills its full potential when the other woman comes into frame. At first, she's discussed as an uncontrollable force, some unpredictable property that might throw the whole endeavor off its axis and into chaos. You grow to expect an eldritch abomination out in the mundane world, the temptress supreme. What camera and dispeller eventually find is far more human, smaller and pragmatic in ways that seem antithetical to affairs of the heart. By refocusing on the mistress, the documentary puts its empathetic approach to the test and comes out on the other side, extending its curiosity to a class system whose gender norms dictate one's means to achieve security. 

Hearing her say things like "he gave me his love and later I returned that love to his wife" also underlines the role of self-determination inherent to the story. One always wants to feel in control, even when each choice comes from a set of socio-economical limitations, not to mention the heart's wild wills. We'll do anything to feel our fates are in our own hands and not those of others. Paradoxically, that can go through the hiring of a service such as the mistress dispeller, manipulations, lies left and right in the name of marital integrity or simple financial stability. The titular figure may state that her company sells solutions, not necessarily the true, but this documentary reveals a fair share of human truths just the same.

Mistress Dispeller played in the TIFF Docs program, having already competed in the Orizzonti section of the Venice Film Festival.