Mistress Dispeller (Lo, 2025)
I have been going to Full Frame for almost fifteen years, and Mistress Dispeller is the only film I can think of that I’ve screened at the festival where I wondered if it would have been better off being a fictionalized narrative. Despite the film’s (and director Jennifer Lo’s) assurance that nothing is scripted, the details of how the dispeller industry works remained frustratingly opaque to me.
The title refers to a professional who is hired to break up an extra-marital affair. This profession is apparently common in China, and it is a cultural difference worth contemplating for American audiences. Lo told the audience that filming was done with the consent of all parties, both before and after contact was made with the titular figure.
Yet early in the process, the disppeller discusses with the woman whose husband is having an affair the problem of how to integrate and explain her presence to the husband. She is introduced as a young friend who wants to learn how to play badminton, and she scripts a scenario with her client for how to pick a fight and leave so that she can question the client’s husband about the affair. If he knows in advance who the dispeller is and what she is doing, why the subterfuge? Is this simply a cultural reticence to speak plainly? But if he does not know, how are the cameras explained?
These questions don’t torpedo the film. The emotions and beats of confronting an affair are familiar enough that the audience can follow what is happening. And it is clear enough that the film wants to be as much if not more about the industry than the individual case.
Footage from the dispeller’s office suggests that it is a booming business, so perhaps the film might have been better served if it were organized around interviews and various case studies rather than a single client. But that would probably have pushed the film in the direction of talking heads, and Lo’s direction is already stylistically emulating a narrative film anyway.
Take the opening scene where opera music accompanies a woman getting a haircut to set up the later domestic exchange where she is disappointed that the time and effort she has spent has been met without comment. Did he notice? There’s a striking extended take of a busy intersection that has little to do with the plot but shows Lo’s drive to push beyond camera confessionals and visually static interviews. Even the sound design and snippets from an early badminton workout show, with narrative economy, the anger beneath the surface of a betrayed woman’s placid demeanor.
Don’t get me wrong, I love documentaries. But one of the most important decisions any creator faces is how to find the form best suited for the content she is presenting. The style and narrative structure keep the focus on the marriage. But the title and presentation suggest that Lo wants the focus to be on the professional dispeller. There are two really interesting stories here, one familiar, one exotic, and the documentary feels uncertain about which one it wants us to attend to.
A counter-argument is, of course, that the marriage is a vehicle, and that a generic film about dispellers would lack the pathos of one that sees what could sound like satire played out in heartrending earnest. Perhaps. But then maybe Lo does her job too well. Mistress Dispeller is like a .45 record released to the public where the B-side ends up being a better song than the A-side.
