Mistress Dispeller

Extra-marital affairs are usually, by their very nature, a secretive business, which is just one of the reasons Elizabeth Lo’s documentary - which takes us into the heart of one - is so compelling. In China such affairs are also the source of a growing business for “mistress dispellers”, a sort of clandestine variation on couples counselling, in which wives secretly hire a relationship guru to go undercover in a bid to split their husband from his dalliance.

Lo gets remarkable access to all three corners of a love triangle thanks in no small part to the Mistress Dispeller involved, Wang Zhenxi. Although we learn little about her, beyond the fact she has a psychology degree which she puts to deft use, her holistic approach to her job leads all three parties to open up about their feelings through the course of the film.

She’s been hired by Mrs Li (all the members of the love triangle use pseudonyms), a trim older woman, who, if the snippets we see here are anything to go by, regularly bests her husband at the badminton they both love. Mrs Li has found out by accident that her husband has been seeing much younger delivery girl Fei Fei and is anxious to put a stop to it.

Lo takes a quietly observant, fly-on-the-wall approach as the situation begins to play out. While China may be culturally distinctive, this story of infidelity is familiar from a thousand telenovelas. Mrs Li observes that her husband barely pays attention to her - failing to spot her new haircut is just one of his crimes - while Mr Li talks about how his marriage is largely based around “practical” elements, while being with Fei Fei is “like being in the sun”. Fei Fei generates a sense of displacement. Her job seems to be unfulfilling and she’s all too aware that being a mistress isn't so far from a zero hours contract either, given that you never know when you'll get your turn at romance or for how long. It’s also notable that more than once, relationships are framed by the women as a competition with a winner and a loser, indicating a patriarchal tendency that is baked in.

Lo’s camera periodically includes shots of flat tower blocks, each window a reminder of the multitude of worlds that it holds. There are also moments in which we see wedding photographs being taken, nudging us to consider the way we all like to construct an image of happiness.

While the job Wang is doing may sound brutal, in her case, at least, it turns out to be based around empathy. By posing as a friend and a cousin, she puts herself in a position to listen to Mr Li and Fei Fei, while also encouraging Mrs Li to work on her marriage from her side. Like Lo’s previous film Stray - about street dogs in Istanbul - this is a film that is built upon patience and which takes a philosophical rather than judgmental stance. That approach is further evidenced by the fact that everyone signed up to participate in the film, albeit with a very vague description used for Fei Fei in the first instance, and signed off on it once again, in full knowledge, when it was completed. Less about the wider "mistress dispeller" industry - which surely deserves an entire documentary in itself - than the mechanics of a modern marriage and how to potentially fix what is broken, this is an unusual and absorbing documentary.