Elizabeth Lo explores China’s love industry in ‘Mistress Dispeller’

With Mistress Dispeller having started its U.S. theatrical rollout, we sat down with Lo to talk about mistress dispelling, China’s “love industry,” how Wang got into the work, and how she gained the trust of her participants.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Dan Schindel: It’s interesting that a lot of mistress dispelling comes down to counseling and therapy, but cloaked in different terminology to make it more palatable for people for whom there's a lot of stigma on such practices.
Elizabeth Lo: Yeah. I asked Teacher Wang at one point, “Why can't you just go in and tell the husband you're a marriage counselor and you're going to help their relationship out?” She said that because it's so stigmatized in most of China, had she entered as a total stranger, she would get rejected immediately. So instead she adopts these covert identities to meet people, like a college friend or someone else within their social circles. She relies on that preexisting trust established when the husband thinks she is already in their circle somehow. Even the way we got access to them, it was through a referral from the little brother. It makes a lot of human sense to me that by posing as someone within your organic circles, there would be a greater level of comfort. But of course, it's ethically murky.

DS: How did Wang get into this business? What did she study? What experience did she have before she discovered this talent?
EL: She struggled with infidelity, and she wished there was someone who could have helped her. She studied psychology to help herself out of her emotional turmoil, and then discovered her calling first as a counselor. She became a mistress dispeller because she was so effective at that niche. She's very much a self-taught woman, and I think most of her skillset cannot be taught. She's incredibly astute and perceptive; her EQ is off the charts. She's like a master chess player, she knows exactly what string to pull and what reaction that will elicit 10 steps down. She has apprentices, and she’s tried to scale her business, but she's found that it's hard to teach others to read such subtle cues, to strategize about the heart and where it will go. Few people can do that as effectively as her.

Teacher Wang in "Mistress Dispeller."

Oscilloscope Laboratories

DS: I read in one interview that Mrs. Li found Wang through her brother, which isn’t mentioned in the film itself. Could you elaborate on that?
EL: We filmed with Teacher Wang for three years, documenting multiple cases before we got access to a couple like Mr. and Mrs. Li. We filmed with Mr. and Mrs. Li for four months. Two years prior, we met Mrs. Li’s little brother because he was a male mistress who was being “dispelled” by Teacher Wang. We filmed just toward the end of his experience. But as is often the case with Teacher Wang, she stayed friends with him. She positions herself as someone who has helped a mistress, even if she got them out of a client's marriage. So years later, when the brother found out his sister was being cheated on, he recommended both Teacher Wang and participating in this film to her, calling it a good experience for him.

DS: You filmed all these other facets of the “love industry” in China. How did you arrive at an hour-and-a-half-long film about these four people?
EL: We always wanted to interweave the macro environment in which these people's love stories are unfolding. The thesis of the film is contained in one of those early vignettes about the Lushan love college, when the man on a podium says, "The shape of our hearts is predetermined by systems larger than us." There’s no decision you make that isn’t shaped by the environment you grew up in, the values that you're taught. That’s why we have these vignettes of other love industries, whether it's the parental marriage market that ties your desirability to whether you have a mortgage, or the telemarketer matchmaker who says a woman's value goes down as her age goes up. All these forces are bearing down on our characters too, indirectly. The audience can make those connections themselves, gaining a greater understanding of people’s choices.

DS: How did you get each of the three parts of the love triangle to agree to participate? I’m especially curious about what Mr. Li and Fei Fei thought the project would be.
EL: I will say, one condition under which they all participated was that the film would never be publicly released in China. That was a big part of what made them feel comfortable. Mrs. Li was persuaded because Teacher Wang expressed to her that so many people go through these problems privately, because in China, domestic shame should not be made public. I think some altruistic side of her felt that in sharing her story, it would help other women who are undergoing the same thing find a way out of this turmoil.

For Mr. Li and Fei Fei, we never directly contacted them before filming. It was Wang's business partner who approached them about being in the movie. Because we had shot so many other cases prior to meeting them, as well as so many different love industries—dating camps, divorce lawyers, matchmakers—they committed to being in the film only for a few days at first, as some of many participants in a documentary about love in China. At that point, that was true, because we didn't know that the whole film would evolve to hinge on the three of them. We didn't know whether they could carry an entire feature film, or what direction it would take. Neither they nor we knew how large a role they would play in the final project.

It was imperative throughout this production that by the end, we would travel back to China and show them a cut of the film. Thankfully, they re-consented to being a part of the project. If they dropped out, we would be fine. It would've been very disappointing, because they're incredible characters, but we had such a wealth of material shot over three years that our problem in the edit was really leaving all of that behind.

Fei Fei, Mr. Li's mistress, in Elizabeth Lo's "Mistress Dispeller."

Oscilloscope Laboratories

DS: At what point did the husband and mistress learn what was really going on?
EL: I think the husband figured it out midway through that this woman is a counselor figure who is going to help him achieve his ultimate priority, which is to preserve his family and the harmony in his marriage. I think Teacher Wang helped him see that if you care about your family, you're going to have to make certain sacrifices. You can't hang onto this young woman.

For Fei Fei, I think three-quarters of the way through, she figured out Teacher Wang's agenda, that she was aligned with preserving the marriage rather than helping her stay with the husband. In the breakup scene, she says to Teacher Wang, "I trust you, you're very genuine." And then she kicks Wang out so she can confront the husband. I’m guessing that she'd figured it out, but she had so much confidence in her relationship that she felt she could overcome the Mistress Dispeller's agenda. But these are just my guesses about their psychology at any given point.