Mistress Dispeller
What do you do when you find out that your husband has been cheating on you? If you live in the United States, you might give away his prized record collection on Craigslist or, if you’re feeling less petty, simply file for divorce. But if you’re in China, you might do things a little differently. Mistress Dispeller explores the work of one woman who is in the profession of breaking up affairs, an apparently not uncommon job within a society that would prefer the marital problem go away quietly. It’s a fascinating look at the outsourcing of emotional labor required to maintain relationships, one that speaks to an emotional repression and overwhelming desire to keep up appearances.
Mistress Dispeller begins as a middle-aged woman contemplates how to approach the revelation of her husband’s infidelity, getting a new hairdo as though she was about to march into battle. Divorce is out of the question, as she believes that it would ruin her family, but she also can’t countenance the idea of the affair continuing to carry on. So she hires a mistress dispeller, an enterprising young woman named Wang Zhenxi who will use her unique set of skills to break up the extramarital relationship. She quietly insinuates herself into the lives of both the husband and his mistress, becoming their confidant but also gently guiding them to realize they need to end their affair.
The fact that her profession exists – and is surprisingly successful – speaks to how thoroughly these couples are able to remove emotion from the equation, or at least to deny its power. There’s no question that the wife in this situation hurts deeply and feels betrayed by her husband, but she’s nonetheless committed to maintaining their family unit, even at the cost of her own personal pain. She’s asked to rationalize her husband’s behavior, as well as understand why a woman might put herself in the position of his mistress. She’s not necessarily sweeping his affairs under the rug – she’s taking action in this narrow, socially acceptable way – but intellectualizing all of this helps her to cope with it as a reality in her life. The expression of love in a marriage changes as a couple ages, she muses glumly, seeming to expect respect and companionship more than passion.
As much as Mistress Dispeller primarily focuses on how this one woman manages to heal a broken marriage without either party ever directly confronting the other, the documentary also makes the decision to focus on the beginning of relationships as they are born in China. It intermittently cuts to the process by which upwardly mobile young adults find partners in Chinese society. Their marriages are designed to function as the formation of a new family unit in which both parties bring specific, predetermined assets to the union much more than a romantic relationship. Matchmakers are commonly utilized to help introduce respectable young people to potential prospects, with a litany of criteria at play to help weed out undesirable candidates. One young woman is told that she will have better luck in Beijing, because she’s too tall and successful for the local market. So it makes sense to link these two practices, the matchmaker and the mistress dispeller, as two transactional bookends of the marriage process. While the idea of hiring a third party to break up your husband’s affair rather than confronting him about it yourself might seem strange to western audiences, it falls in line with a different version of love and marriage. The preservation of the social unit is the first priority, and must be accomplished as quietly as possible.
But what’s especially interesting about Mistress Dispeller – and what makes it such a successfully executed documentary – is how thoroughly it avoids judging any of the people involved in this love triangle. Wang makes it a point to try to understand the perspective of all three players: the spurned wife, the unfaithful husband, and the unfulfilled mistress. It’s only by maintaining a perspective that is uninformed by emotion that she can gently guide the three where they need to go. But it also speaks to the nuances of Chinese culture that however impossible it may be to keep these entanglements free from emotion, the painstaking reconstruction of a broken marriage must be done under a veil of secrecy, the particulars hidden from even those most intimately involved. Mistress Dispeller isn’t just keeping this one couple together – in China, she’s holding together the entire institution of marriage itself.
Directed by Elizabeth Lo
Runtime 94 minutes
Language Mandarin