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WNYC Studios is supported by Apple TV.
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It's 1972. A young British family is attempting to sail around the world when disaster strikes. Their boat is hit by killer whales and it sinks in seconds. All they have left is a life raft and each other. This is the true story of the Robertson family and their fight to survive, hosted by me, Becky Milligan. Listen to Adrift, an Apple Original podcast produced by Blanchard House. Follow and listen on Apple Podcasts.
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This is all of it on wnyc. I'm Alison Stewart. Happy Friday everybody. I hope you have a restful and restorative weekend planned. If you're looking for some suggestions for things to do or listen to, go back to some of the conversations that we had on the show. This week. We spoke with active Renata Reinzvi about her role in the great new film Sentimental Value. It's in theaters now. We also spoke to Kat Greenleaf about her podcast Soberness. That one in particular struck a chord with you. Our phone lines were full throughout, so thanks to everybody who shared their stories. And yesterday we spoke to the stars of two plays, Kara Young and Nicholas Braun, who are starring in gruesome Playground Injuries, and Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter, who are in waiting for Gadot. Plus, if you saw the review in the Times today for the Wilfredo lam exhibit at MoMA, you'll see it was a rave. By the way, yesterday we spoke to the curators. Definitely give it a listen and check out the exhibit. You can listen to all of it wherever you get your podcasts or by going to our show page on the WNYC website, wnyc.org now let's get this hour started with Doc NYC Foreign. For the rest of November, we will be spotlighting some of the great documentaries featured in the annual Documentary Documentary Film Festival Doc nyc. Today's selection is Mistress Dispeller. What is a Mistress Dispeller, you might ask? It's a person whose job is to stop affairs through covert operations. The Mistress Dispeller befriends the adulterers and convinces them to see the light. It's a whole industry that has popped up in China in the last few years. Director Elizabeth Lowe found one such Mistress Dispeller who was willing to let herself be filmed with clients. It almost seems like a scripted relationship drama, but it is all real. Mistress Dispeller is screening now at the IFC center as part of Doc nyc and I'm joined now by Elizabeth Lowe. Nice to meet you.
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D
Hi. Thank you so much for having me.
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C
How did you first hear about this industry.
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D
So I was. I wanted to make my second film set in China. I grew up in Hong Kong, and I wanted it to be a love story. And I thought it would be really interesting to look at the structure of love and family from the marginalized gaze of a mistress who's just outside of that. And as I was researching mistresses in China, I came across the mistress dispelling phenomenon. And at first I thought this could only be a fiction film, because who would reveal their lives in this way? But it was when I worked with my Chinese producer, Maggie Lee, to locate dozens of real mistress dispellers. And we met them on day one of a scouting trip with Teacher Wang. She was the only mistress dispeller who was working, who was able to let us into the lives of her clients who were willing to be on camera, including all three parties of the same love triangle. And once I saw that she had this incredible ability and relationship with her clients enough that they trusted her to be on camera, I knew that we had a film. Because even in that one afternoon that I spent with her on another case that's not in the film that you see, I was so moved unexpectedly by each of their perspectives, including the cheating husbands and the mistress who is fracturing this family. I thought it would be really meaningful to make a film that expanded your compassion to corners that you might not expect.
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C
I want to back up a little bit and look at the big picture. Why has it become so popular recently? Has something shifted in the culture in China?
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D
So this industry and service has only cropped up in the last 10 years, and some people have theorized that, you know, since the Cultural Revolution in communist times, as China's wealth has skyrocketed over the last, you know, 50 years, as people are, you know, rising up into the middle class and the upper middle classes, that as wealth has accumulated, men have also sort of, you know, accumulated wealth enough to be able to sustain having multiple women in their lives. And that is part of a trend. And then because of that sort of rise in infidelity since the communist era, there is now a demand for by wives to reassert fidelity when their households, but through an indirect mean, by means by hiring a mistress dispeller who infiltrates her home under a false identity and influences her partner and their spouse to end the affair, seemingly of their own accord, as a way to avoid direct confrontation within the family, so that everyone is able to save face and sort of preserve their dignity even at the end of the crisis, as it's resolved.
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C
While you were making this film, what.
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Did you want to investigate about love and about marriage?
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D
Going into this, I didn't have preconceived notions at first. I thought, you know, this would be a portrait of how women navigate modern society today. I was really inspired by rewatching Zhang Yimou's seminal film, Raise the Red Lantern, which is about a young woman who marries into a wealthy patriarch's home as the fourth wife in 1920s China, and she's forced to compete with the three other wives for his affection to survive. And I thought I wanted to transpose the spirit of that fiction film onto modern day China and see if I could find the equivalent there. But, you know, it was really meeting Teacher Wang and having her dissolve my judgments about all three parties, including the men. It's what really sort of like opened my eyes to what the possibilities of this film could be, because it could be through her work, disentangling this love triangle. An example examination of what each person is going through within a marriage, and to have curiosity for what a man is going through as he's at this fork in the road where he's choosing between duty for his family and his love for his family versus his desires and maybe his sense of happiness. And the mistresses too. Why has she chosen to be in a situation that is not necessarily beneficial to her, where she's in the shadows and a wife who chooses to stay despite being betrayed in such a massive way? So I really went into this with a sense of empathy for all three already. And over the course of making this film and witnessing Teacher Wang, who's the Mistress Dispeller, her work with people and her clients. I've just come to be really humbled by people's openness to revealing themselves in this way, but also their bravery in meeting the crisis within their families in a way that is unconventional, but is. Is striving for connection at the end of the day, even as there is, you know, as you'll see in the film, so much disconnection and so much miscommunication.
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My guest is director Elizabeth Lowe. We're talking about her new documentary, Mistress Dispeller. It follows a woman in China who is hired to stop marital affairs. It's screening now at the IFC center as part of Doc nyc. It took you a while to find a mistress dispeller who would allow you to follow her. How did you find Teacher Wong and how long did it take you to find her?
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D
Yes, so it was. Finding her was. Was fast. My producer, Maggie, you know scoured Chinese social media and the news for real mistress dispellers. And if you go online in China looking for this service that's literally called Mistress dispelling, hundreds of companies will pop up. And many of those companies will use tactics like intimidation, blackma seduction as their way to sort of, you know, resolve this kind of crisis. But Teacher Wang was the only one who sort of approached this issue with a more soft power approach where she's using therapeutic techniques, where she's befriending you instead of punishing you. She's really trying to meet each of the clients, including the mistress, at their level, to understand what they need in life, what they're going through, and that's how she really gets so close to them. And because of the nature of her sort of methodology in approaching families in crisis, that is also what allowed us to gain access to them with our cameras. And it took us three years, though, of following Teacher Wang and trying to get access out of hundreds of cases that she had. Every year we would get access to film one or two. So over three years, we filmed with around six cases. And it was only at the tail end of those three years, the last four months, we were able to get access to film a case from beginning to end. And that's the couple that is in the movie. And that they reconsented to being a part of the project even after they realized Teacher Wang's real identity in their lives as a mistress dispeller, which they were not aware of at the beginning of filming of the case, because deception is so inherent to her process. And that was something that, you know, my producer, Emma Miller. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like, how do you handle this from an ethical perspective? You know, transparency and our responsibility to our, our participants is so key. And so what my producer, Emma Miller and I did that, you know, we knew that of course, the husband and the mistress couldn't have known what the Mistress Disweller's real role was in their lives, what they. What she had been hired to do by the wife. And so they were approached to be a part of a documentary that was more broadly about modern love and relationships in China, in which they were perhaps a small role in an ensemble, which was true at the time because we had filmed with so many other cases and we had also filmed across different love industries in China because we didn't know whether we could get the access that we did. So we filmed with divorce lawyers, matchmakers, speed dating events, dating camps, even bdsm, you know, rope play communities to diversify our Plan in case we couldn't get the access that we did. And by the end of those four months of filming with them, which is the typical amount of time it takes for Teacher Wang to dispel, quote unquote, a mistress within a case at the end, once they were aware of what she had really done in their lives, we then actually traveled back to China with a cut of the film to show each of them separately, sort of get their blessing for the film. And at that point, they could either reconsent to being a part of the project or they could opt to drop out. And we could afford to allow them to drop out because we had this contingency built into our production in which we had so many backup plans where we could, you know, pivot to a more diffuse portrait of. Of love in China. But thankfully, as you'll see in the film, they are such generous, unselfconscious people and gracious people that they allowed us to.
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Yeah.
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D
Why do you think in the film.
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C
Why do you think they said y.
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D
So my. You know, that is always unknowable. I think they're real motivations. But what I think is that my editor, Charlotte Munchbankson and I, when we took that footage where they sometimes over revealed themselves, and the way we filmed it is once we figured out where the conversations were taking place, we would hit record and the whole crew would leave the room. And so that they could feel as unselfconscious as possible because we didn't know how the scenes would unfold and we didn't want our crew there to be to making them feel even.
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C
Can I see? Can I see? Can I watch it? Get mad at your.
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D
Exactly, exactly. So they're not in the room. And so while they're obviously very conscious of being filmed, they're also forgetting in some ways. And so when they would over reveal themselves in the edit, Charlotte and I, my editor, really took it upon ourselves to protect them, to protect their dignity, to protect their reputations within the film to viewers who are going to consume these images. And so I think on some level, after watching the film, they could sense that care around how they're portrayed. Because the impetus for me making the film was really so that you could find empathy and some kind of sympathy with each of the figures within each side of this love triangle. And I think in seeing that, they could sense the respect that we had for them and how much protection we had sort of built into the way we told their story, affording them each a platform to speak about how they were feeling and, and protecting them.
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C
The film isn't judgmental at all. Did you ever have to fight that feeling?
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D
No, no, I. I mean, I think it's just when you witness people. Well, with this case that is in the film. No, because I think they were all really decent people. Decent people? Yeah. And which is why they could carry a film. There were other cases that we filmed where people behaved in ways, especially the men, in ways that felt so alienated and. And inexplicable that there was no way that I wanted to build a film around them, even if they lent to more juicy and salacious material because they were willing to make moves on their mistresses in front of my camera while I'm there. But that was not our goal. Our goal was to tell a different kind of story.
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C
I'm speaking with director Elizabeth Low. We're talking about her new documentary, Mistress Dispeller.
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E
It's a part of DOC NYC showing now at the IFC Center. The woman who hired the mistress Dispeller, first of all, why did she hire her? Was she aware that her husband was having an affair?
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C
What was going on in her life?
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D
That's a great question. So she had found a text message pop up on her husband's phone with a very intimate message from a young woman. And so that's what alerted to her that her husband was having an affair. And so she tells her younger brother about this. She doesn't know who to confide in but him. And as it turns out, his, her younger brother was someone that over those three years we had actually filmed with two years ago, he himself was a male mistress. There's no word for a male Mr. And he himself was being dispelled by Teacher Wang from another marriage. And so he had a good experience being filmed by us. But he also, by the end of that process, how effective Wang was at her job because he himself was dispelled and willingly. And so when his older sister came to him two years later and said, my husband is cheating on me, what do I do? I want to save my family. He tells her, I have the perfect solution for you. Participate in this film. The film crew are lovely, but more importantly, Teacher Wang, this Mistress Dispeller is a magician who will make your problem go away. So we had that sort of pre existing vouch of approval from a trusted relative through the younger brother that we happened to have filmed with two years prior. And that's why, sort of, she trusted us and also Wang, to help solve her family's crisis in this indirect way because she didn't want to confront her husband directly. She didn't know what to do because she felt that by naming it out loud to him and while also wanting to stay, that it would somehow explicitly condone his behavior.
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E
She. In some way, though, I think watching the film, she did know something was wrong because she took such efforts to try to make herself more attractive.
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D
Yes, yes.
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E
And it was interesting. And I think I saw this in an interview. She's getting her hair cut again, and she starts to cry.
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D
Yeah. That's the first shot of the film, and that was the first day we ever filmed with her.
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C
Really?
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D
Yes. And I think it's cause she was reflecting about the circumstances by which a film crew had entered her life, which is that she's been betrayed by the love of her.
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E
Yeah. And she's getting her hair cut, and she's doing exercise and she's putting on makeup. Because this is sort of lurking in the back of her mind. Her husband is not with her.
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D
Yeah, yeah. She knows. She knows. And you'll see in the film, and this is one of the critiques of the mistress dispelling industry, perhaps, or this method is that it's women who are mostly taking up all that emotional labor, in addition to trying to maintain and to fight comfort, fight against aging, to sustain interest from your partner. On top of all of that, she's also the one who has to repress her emotions, bite her tongue to save her family so that he doesn't feel threatened and is driven away.
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For Teacher Wang, she has to take on another Persona in front of the husband.
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And it's kind of amazing how quickly he admits to her that he is involved in an extramarital affair. Why do you think he was so willing to tell her? Or did he just want to tell someone?
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D
No, that's so. That's a very astute observation. And that is my theory, too. So in a lot of the cases that we witnessed and filmed, other cases, we also saw how quickly these men sort of open up to Teacher Wang because she enters in a very soft, gentle way. She's not accusing them of having an affair. She's just like. She lays a little trap by telling a little lie that he believes, and that leaves an opening for him to sort of talk about this person that he actually feels very strongly about. And I think when someone is having an affair and they're potentially in love, but they can't share that with anybody in their lives, when this woman enters, who is positioning herself as sort of like both an insider to your community, but an unknown outsider. So she's completely neutralized and is completely non judgmental and is simply there to sort of help you through what you're confused about in your family. He very willingly unloads on her. And I think that's just because there's no one else in his life to do that with. And I have a theory that the men obviously who participate, who are willing to be in this film on some level, they're not so ashamed of the fact that they're having an affair. And also if they're in love, they want to talk about who they're in love with. And so that's why. That's my theory for why the men that we filmed with so quickly open up to Teacher Wang.
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C
It's interesting because I know to make the film, there was a concern that China might come off looking bad as part of the film. They're sort of less concerned with what the film was about. Did you have to sign a contract?
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D
Yeah, yeah. So it was very surprising to us that the participants of our film were less concerned about, you know, having cheated or being cheated on. They, they were actually more concerned with whether participating in the film would, you know, break any kind of national security laws. And so we actually signed contracts with them with language that was that broad, that we will not portray China in a negative light. But I was perfectly comfortable signing that. Even though of course it's a risky thing to do as a filmmaker, because I grew up in Hong Kong and I knew that whatever film I was going to make in China, set in China, that would be consumed internationally with the rising anti China sentiment that's in the west, that it would not contribute to perpetuating stereotypes or further alienating international audiences from regular Chinese people. And I felt like a love story in which people are trying their best and where they're going through heartache and betrayal and longing, you know, emotions that are universal and timeless, that that would be able to achieve this intention. That film would hopefully be a bridge between audiences everywhere around the world with just, you know, a middle aged, middle class couple in China who are just trying to live their lives and live through love and also pain and. And also, of course, as a documentarian, I did not want to endanger my participants and also my crew. But one of the conditions which they agreed to be a part of the film that we agreed to is that the film would never be publicly released in China. And so that's partly why they also felt more comfortable in exposing so much about their lives.
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E
The mistress in this case, have you heard from her? Do you know how she is?
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D
So we sort of like keep in touch with them through Teacher Wang. And as far as we know, Mr. And Mrs. Lee are still married. And Fei Fei, the mistress, is sort of, sort of living her life as she was, but without Mr. Lee.
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E
Without Mr. Lee. How did working on this project change your thoughts about marriage and relationships?
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D
This question is always so hard to answer because over the three years of making this film, I think my view of love had changed a lot. And I think for someone like my producer Maggie, who, you know, witnessed, you know, there's no rhyme or reason or pattern to who, why men are cheating, it's made her a little bit cynical about love. But for me, I think what I see in our participants in their struggle and, and all the love stories that we filmed over those years is that I think at the heart of it, people have a great desire for connection and love. It's just there's larger societal forces that get in the way and pressures that get in the way of people connecting in a genuine way. And I think it takes work, a lot of work. And that's what Wang also, you know, teaches imbues to her clients. It takes work to work through that. And also building your own sense of self worth and knowing your real priorities in life, whether it's, if your family is really important to you, then then don't step out and. Or if you really care about being a part of a complete love, then don't engage in an extramarital affair if you're a mistress. So lessons like that, I think building your own sense of what you deserve, and that's what she does for all our clients has been something that has informed my own approach to love. After making this film and witnessing all the work and wisdom that she imparts to her clients from behind the camera.
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The name of the documentary is Mistress Dispeller. Its director is Elizabeth Lowe. You can see it now as part of Doc NYC at the IFC Center. Thank you for coming in.
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Thank you so much for having me.
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