When it comes to documentaries, the wilder the subject matter, and the less likely it could be captured via the documentary format, the better. Take Elizabeth Lo’s Mistress Dispeller. The film opens with a disclaimer that it involves no staged scenes, and also had the cooperation of its subjects both before and after the fact. Yet how do you make a movie about the niche Chinese profession of dispelling mistresses – where the dispeller inserts themselves into an affair to break it up, at the behest of the spurned partner – without all three parties being hip to what’s going on? Given that the necessarily blind two of those three are being recorded constantly by cameras, exactly what sort of movie do they think they’re appearing in?

Mistress Dispeller is a bit vague on those details, but it seems unlikely Lo would risk giving us something that’s anything other than fully genuine. Any attempt to pull the wool over the eyes of the audience would be too easily discovered. And really, Mistress Dispeller is not about the necessary cloak and dagger elements of a scenario like this, though its inherent gaslighting is certainly interesting to ponder. (Fight fire with fire, fight gaslighting with more gaslighting.)

More than that it’s about our society’s larger myths about love, relationships and fidelity, and how one particular love triangle illustrates, through a very compassionate lens, the way any affair is replete with human weakness – especially with the mistress herself, typically considered the villain in such a scenario, but potentially the most desperate and broken character of the three.

Wang Zhenxi is the mistress dispeller of the title, and her job is to insinuate herself into the lives of the people in question in order to make the straying husband realise he really wants to come back to his wife rather than continue to see a (younger, more beautiful) woman on the side. The details of the couple this film profiles seem fairly ordinary. They’re in their late 40s/early 50s, an age that still makes him viable to a “younger model,” even though he’s not particularly a looker. She’s tried to get his attention with a haircut, but he says he didn’t notice it because she was wearing a hat. One day she comes across texts on his phone that don’t reveal an affair in so many words, but contain an intimacy only possible for two people who have been, well, intimate.

The wife, in conjunction with her younger brother, hires Wang’s services. Wang is going to pass herself off as the friend of the younger brother, and the wife is going to introduce Wang to her husband in the context of being a friend who wants to learn badminton. (Badminton being an activity the couple still shares, one of many things that make them look like a functional couple to the outside world.) This leads to a dinner at their house, where the plan is for him to cook, for her to complain about his cooking and walk out in a huff, and for the dispeller to use the incident to start asking him questions about the status of the relationship, in which she hopes she’ll gain the sort of trust necessary to be influential. And this is just step 1, because the plan is for her to meet the mistress too.

It’s kind of difficult to believe how smoothly it all goes, at least step 1, which is the kind of thing that sets your mind wandering again toward accusations of staging. The cheating husband ends up fully divulging that he is in an affair, which seems crazy given that this woman has presented herself as his wife’s friend and confidante, and he only just met her. One imagines not every one of Wang’s cases unfolds as well as this one did, and perhaps there are failed attempts to get this footage on the cutting room floor of Mistress Dispeller, with other couples.

The movie reveals all sorts of interesting dynamics and becomes a unique window into Chinese society. Mistress dispelling could certainly be a thing in other countries, but there’s a frankness to the conversations here that have a cultural specificity to them, even within the larger context of the multiple levels of illusion.

In between scenes that progress the dispeller’s impact on the husband and ultimately his mistress, we get contemplative images of other instances of coupling in Chinese society – a form of thematic B roll that underscores the issues being discussed in the interview dialogue that plays over it. Lo’s film has an interest in what makes and breaks couples in all relationships, with this serving as just one example.

And then there’s the mistress. Indeed this woman is young enough and beautiful enough to easily capture someone her own age, who is already single and probably better in the looks department than the mediocre man – who is not rich, by the way – she’s chosen to be with. So we suspect, though don’t fully learn, that something in her own past has destabilised her and left her in her current position.

As much as Wang is trying to achieve a particular end here, she doesn’t want it to be at the cost of this woman’s dignity. Here Wang slips into the role of therapist almost, seeking to bring about a graceful exit from the relationship for all of them, rather than to mend one relationship while being indifferent to the fiery collateral wreckage she might leave.

Does she pull this off? You’ll have to see the movie. And you should. Mistress Dispeller is not going to blow your mind, and there are nagging questions about the truthfulness of its execution that never fully dissipate. But even if Lo did cook the books while making this movie – and I’m not saying she did – the final product leaves us in a contemplative state about our own relationships, and how we either nurture or fail to nurture them.

 

Mistress Dispeller is currently playing in Australian cinemas.