"When a fish takes the bait, your heart will beat with the fish."
DOXA Documentary Film Festival
As the documentary unfolds, we witness a Chinese wife, desperate to turn around her marital troubles, hire Teacher Wang, a professional "mistress dispeller" (yes, it's a very real job), to drive a wedge between her husband and his apparent new younger lover to break up their affair. Wang aggressively injects herself into the personal lives of her clients under dubious pretenses to observe and try to fix their spousal problems.
It's consistently amusing watching Wang make little comments about everything while abruptly disrupting some of their very personal details. She then meets said mistress with the husband's participation (as his "cousin") and seemingly befriends her to better understand the reason for the romantic arrangement. Hiring a mistress dispeller provides a novel way to address infidelity without direct confrontation as an essentially effective means of outsourcing marriage counselling. It's also a sympathetic portrait of why someone would voluntarily become the "other woman," treating this third person with a surprising amount of compassion.
China's growing industry dedicated to combating extramarital affairs uses emotional manipulation, among other questionable methods, to expose the deep complexities that cause infidelity. Lo's methods of capturing these candid conversations reveal the complicated motivations of loyalty and control behind the traditional Eastern ideals of marriage and the lengths some are willing to go to preserve them. The most obvious unclear issue is exactly how Lo was seemingly so easily permitted to film all the participants (often alone) in Mistress Dispeller without them fully knowing each other's true motives.
Mistress Dispeller screened at both the 2025 Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival and DOXA Documentary Film Festival as part of the Highlights program at The Cinematheque.
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