Mistress Dispeller

 

Director Elizabeth Lo

The director on the set

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

MISTRESS DISPELLER            C+                                                                                           China  USA  (94 mi)  2024  d: Elizabeth Lo

Everyone agreed to participate both at the beginning and end of production, as their understanding of the film and mistress dispeller’s role evolved over time.                                    —opening title card 

Teacher Wang taught me a lot.  About love, and other things.  She said, “Look, you are going through this, this difficulty, and we should film it, so more women, more people, can face their families and learn how to handle a situation like this…”  I want more people to know that love doesn’t come easy, especially for people at our age.  Don’t give up so easily.                              —Mrs. Li

While the premise of this documentary is interesting, where the latest Chinese phenomena is hiring someone to officially drive philandering husbands away from their mistresses and back to the fold of the family, yet this one-note subject matter quickly grows tiring, as little is actually learned in this rather light-hearted exposé.  Easily what works best are the operatic inclusions of Puccini musical excerpts, Gianni Schicchi: O, mio babbino caro YouTube (2:22) and Madame Butterfly: Humming Chorus YouTube (3:05), which are emotionally powerful, but most of the film falls flat, despite some rather absurd stabs at humor, as nothing is ever explored in-depth, remaining superficially on the surface for the entire film, so not much is actually learned, though the absence of emotional outbursts or angry confrontations does make the detached, cinéma vérité style more plausible.  One character (Mrs. Li) even acknowledges at one point that she might have acted differently if the camera had not been there.  While the psychological intent makes more sense in theory, attempting to steer the various parties in certain directions, the reality is never satisfying, as we see no evidence of what is proposed.  This is a very ambiguous film, leaving viewers a bit perplexed, shining little light on this unusual profession.  While the culture on display is Chinese, filmed with actual participants in China, the approach feels more American, arising out of the Sundance Institute Producer’s Program, so it’s a bit of a mixed bag.  While a few scenes feel scripted, like bringing in the film crew on camera during a particularly pertinent moment, the fact that this is a straightforward documentary with so little dramatic impact just makes it harder to take seriously, where a differently edited or fictionalized version of tonal shifts might have been more compelling, throwing in scenarios that were simply missing from what we see onscreen, where the quiet lyricism of filmmaker Hong Sang-soo comes to mind.  For instance, we learn next to nothing about the marital relationship or their family, which seems to exist in a vacuum, so viewers gain little insight as to why this relationship needs to be saved, though separation is not an option due to the wealth the husband brings.  The marriage is not close, exhibiting little intimacy, where instead of any romantic connection, love is bound up with sacrifice, duty, and what’s left unspoken, so there’s no reason to suspect that will change in the future, despite the intervention, so in the end they seem no better off. 

Born and raised in Hong Kong, the director graduated from the NYU Tisch School of the Arts, with a Masters in Fine Arts from Stanford University, having been exposed as a youth to pop culture and movie ideals of romance, which drastically differs from the world of China portrayed in this film.  Up until now she has primarily been a director of shorts, making one earlier feature, STRAY (2020), an uncompromising social realist film that offers a dog’s-eye view of Istanbul, inviting viewers into their immersive world, continually providing the spatial point of view of stray dogs on the street.  This, on the other hand, is all about a philosophical concept, a social theory, which the filmmaker attempts to bring to life, with varying degrees of success.  Filmed over the course of two years, where Lo is not just the director, but also the cinematographer and co-editor on the film, the actual subjects feel authentic enough, where the problem is we just never learn very much about them, feeling more like strangers both in the beginning and at the end of the picture.  As we drop into their lives, there’s no real examination of cheating husbands, or this unconventional profession, so we’re left with what we see onscreen, which shows people going through the mundane aspects of their lives, more often bored with their routines, as what they’ve grown accustomed to is the emptiness of their existence, where the promise of middle class comforts has not brought any of them happiness.  Shifting our sympathies between the husband, wife, and mistress, often using a static camera position, the film uses a crisis of infidelity to explore the ways emotion, pragmatism, and cultural norms collide to shape romantic relationships in contemporary China, often involving secrecy and shame, though a more interesting and largely untold aspect is exploring how women navigate Chinese society.  At the center of the story is Teacher Wang (Wang Zhenxi), whose undercover presence attempts to influence the various participants, the middle aged marital couple, Mr. and Mrs. Li, along with the younger mistress Fei Fei, who is attractive, though more economically challenged, yet she confidently expects Mr. Li will choose her in the end, and may have even thought she was the central figure of the shooting, openly expressing a deep longing for love and commitment.  When Mrs. Li suspects her husband’s inexplicable absences are not just due to extended business meetings, she hires the dispeller to save her marriage, as in her grown-up child’s eyes they have the “perfect” family. 

Presumably documenting all sides of the love triangle, neither Mr. Li nor his mistress exhibit any signs of guilt or regret, finding nothing morally wrong with their behavior, while Mrs. Li is simply angry and indignant, yet neither she nor her husband have the capacity to speak about this issue with each other, so it simply festers over time, revealing episodic glimpses of a disintegrating marriage, including tense bickering at the dinner table, or paranoia surrounding cellphone usage, where they are not at all averse to intercepting texts and messages.  While this may be a sociographic reflection of a society undergoing cultural shifts from rigid social norms, it’s hard to get past the element of romantic resignation, the examination of a love story without any signs of love, though Mrs. Li claims that they were once the envy of their friends (who we never see).  Viewers may be a bit skeptical about this so-called profession, where many may be inclined to believe it exists along the same wavelength as psychic readings, where there is little scientific evidence to offer credibility.  Apparently this extramarital industry has only blossomed in the last ten years in China, largely due to rising rates of adultery, along with a growing economy, creating rapidly expanding middle and upper classes and a rising divorce rate, leaving people with options that never existed before, where technology and shifting values play a huge role in reshaping modern ideas on love and marriage.  By holding shots on faces for unconventionally long durations, one can gauge the levels of loneliness and regret that lie under the surface, as people struggle with their shortcomings, yet it’s hard to believe Mr. Li would confess his infidelity to a complete stranger, “With my wife it’s real life, with Fei Fei it’s like being in the sun,” or allow this dispeller, disguised as a distant friend of the family, into his inner sanctum, where that absurdity reaches comic heights by the end.  But it all feels more like people gossiping endlessly about their frustrations in life, as the marital problems are never approached directly, feeling more like a manipulative con job, where professional credentials are produced to take money from wealthy families, presuming they’ll be happy about the outcome.  By the end, however, there is simply no evidence that anyone is happy except the dispeller, who does not come cheap, paid in the tens of thousands for her services, who is the only one who has profited from the experience.  Inexplicably, despite the shortcomings, this film won the Best Documentary at the Chicago Film Festival 2024, Festival Award Winners - Cinema Chicago. 

Deception (Tromperie)

 

Director Arnaud Desplechin

Desplechin with Denis Podalydès

Desplechin on the set with Léa Seydoux

DECEPTION (Tromperie)                  B+                                                                               France (105 mi)  2021 ‘Scope  d: Arnaud Desplechin

All I can tell you with certainty is that I, for one, have no self, and that I am unwilling or unable to perpetrate upon myself the joke of a self. […]  What I have instead is a variety of impersonations I can do, and not only of myself – a troupe of players that I have internalized, a permanent company of actors […] that forms my repertoire.  But I certainly have no self independent of my imposturing, artistic efforts to have one.  Nor would I want one.  I am a theater and nothing more than a theater.

—Philip Roth, The Counterlife, 1986

Desplechin has always been a literary filmmaker, making a living on fast-paced, yet natural sounding dialogue, where this film is no exception, cleverly adapted from Philip Roth’s 1990 autobiographical novel, his first use of “Philip Roth” as a fictional character, coming during the decade of the Reagan/Bush years defined by the fall of the Berlin Wall, ushering in the era of the Clintons and the Internet.  Written entirely in the form of conversations, eschewing any narrative for the theatricality of straight dialogue, like a stream-of-conscious stage play, Desplechin and his recent cowriter Julie Peyr have collaborated before on 2015 Top Ten Films #7 My Golden Days (Trois souvenirs de ma jeunesse), which won a César award and Lumières award for Best Director, and the less successful psychoanalysis drama Jimmy P: Psychotherapy of a Plains Indian (2013).  In this film, set in London in 1987, it’s never hard to distinguish who’s speaking, dominated by the central character Philip Roth (Denis Podalydès), a middle-age American writer living in exile, describing himself as “a talk fetishist,” who is always gathering material for his next novel, gleaning information from his unhappily married female lover (Léa Seydoux), known only as the English Lover (perhaps a reference to Roth’s wife, British actress Claire Bloom), or several former flames, like Jana (Madalina Constantin), a Czech writer caught up in the insidious drama of the Cold War, Rosalie (Emmanuelle Devos), an American woman stricken with cancer (likely based on American novelist Janet Hobhouse, who died at the age of 42 from cancer), a former student from his teaching days at a university (Rebecca Marder), and his long suffering wife (Anouk Grinberg), as the studio that serves as his refuge where he writes is also the site of his affairs, mixing carnal pleasure into his profession, treasuring every word he hears, where astute listening leads to a private notebook of collected notes.  Told with chapter headings, the conversations occur before, during, and after sex, or in a restaurant, or bar, including flashbacks and advancing time lapses, and even includes an imaginary sequence where he is placed on trial by an all-female court for his overt hatred towards women, with prosecutorial suggestions that the women in his works are all vicious stereotypes.  What this attempts to unearth are the “rude truths” of daily existence, including the worldwide onslaught of anti-Semitism and his lifelong struggle of being an unapologetic Jew, with Roth becoming obsessed with observing the smallest details in his lover’s life, attuned to their most intimate thoughts, the moments of hesitation, or regret, the avalanche of painful revelations, while also maintaining an erotic fascination in the present which seems to keep the home fires burning.  All the characters seem to be in a state of flux except the writer, who has found his place, but at a price, as he feels lonely, exiled from the outside world, so he hungers for the stories these women tell and transcribes their words.  Desplechin used this Roth text in a DVD bonus of KINGS & QUEEN (2004), acting the final scene with Emmanuelle Devos, which was actually seen by the author, who encouraged him to do a cinematic adaptation of the book.    

Such an improvement on Roth’s other screen adaptations, Ewan McGregor’s American Pastoral (2016) or Robert Benton’s THE HUMAN STAIN (2003), but Isabel Coixet’s ELEGY (2008) about a 62-year-old literature professor having an affair with a 24-year-old student certainly hits the mark, becoming a fascinating mix of cultures, getting a feminine perspective from the Spanish duo of Penélope Cruz and Coixet.  Shot during the onset of the pandemic in France, with the slimmest of budgets, where the lockdown mirrors the seclusion of the writer, this film is succinctly fluid, a marvel of kinetic energy, rarely more than two people onscreen at any time, racing through the scenes like a director in the thrall of quick film shoots.  While the subject is middle age, it never grows maudlin or sentimental, exploring their lives in minute detail with a rigorous intellectual curiosity and explosive emotionality, as if eavesdropping into private realms, where both are equally fascinated by this psychological dissection, confessing the lies they tell others, or themselves, revealing the concerns they have about being perceived as weak or too strong, what they’ll tolerate or won’t, as they vent about the multiplicity of flaws in their partners, yet refuse to leave, as the English Lover declares, “The more trivial the defect the more anger it inspires.”  Gorgeously shot by Yorick Le Saux, who has previously worked with Olivier Assayas on 2014 Top Ten List #3 Clouds of Sils Maria, Personal Shopper (2016), and Non-Fiction (Doubles Vies) (2018), Claire Denis on High Life (2018), and Greta Gerwig on Little Women (2019), the lighting is especially impressive, creating a luminous private domain, which only frames and accentuates the rapidity of thought that we experience, where it has the feel of a theatrical stage play, quickly moving between scenes, where the common denominator is emotional authenticity and a lack of pretension, shot through a prism of desire, where Seydoux in particular truly excels in this regard, showing an ease of emotional restraint while expanding her astonishing range.  While she’s always had a sensuous onscreen presence, her probing self-reflective qualities are what stand out, exhibited by an intellectual curiosity balanced against her vulnerability, which are a perfect match for this writer, often seen matching wits, which is what makes her such an alluring muse, as he never tires of being with her.  While they banter about divorced friends, ruined children, and her husband who’s carrying on an extramarital liaison of his own, with a “tootsie” no less, one of the interesting aspects of exposing these personal revelations is viewers can only imagine what these women’s lives are like offscreen, as we never see any of them on their own, living in separate worlds, where they may be figments of the imagination, for all we know, only appearing in brief vignettes, like apparitions, always making reference to their actual lives, where artistic license is literally excavating the essence of who they are and what they have to say, as nothing is off limits in the creative world of fiction, which becomes a kind of utopia, where the author imagines himself, outside his novel, having a love affair with a character inside his novel.

While Philip Roth as the womanizing central protagonist is anything but a philandering hero, the film becomes an exposé on the deception of masculinity and the privilege it brings, as men have the capriciousness to have affairs, commit adultery, and otherwise stray from their empty and disappointing marriages as if it’s a God-given right, with society at large turning a blind eye and never holding them accountable, while women are held to a different standard, with Madame Bovary (originally attacked for obscenity) being the moral handbook on how society condemns women more ruthlessly than men, often turning them into something they’re not, degrading their position and stature, having committed moral sins that are overlooked in men.  This film explores that shadow existence of men, that deceitful web of desire that may as well be invisible, as these sins have been ignored throughout history and never recorded alongside the many accomplishments.  Where does this entitlement come from?  In the surreal court proceeding with the author on trial, the judge mockingly asks, “Can you explain to the court why you hate women?”  It carries with it the absurdist rendering of Kafka, whose portrait hangs on the wall of the office by Philip’s desk, where the protagonist finds himself in foreign territory, an alternate imaginary universe where he is judged accordingly on this day of reckoning, guilty of sexism, misogyny, woman abuse, slander of women, denigration of women, defamation of women, and ruthless seduction, crimes he squeamishly denies, each carrying the most severe penalties.  Pleading artistic license, that a writer uses his imagination to portray real events, just like Shakespeare, something that has been part of the human condition since the invention of language, he is guilty nonetheless, having intentionally published books that cause women suffering.  Just like politicians, artists through the years have learned to become more and more manipulative, where the underlying motive at the heart of a novel is deceit, as the writer intends to deceive the reader into believing things that may have never happened.  That is the nature of their craft.  Having affairs with the wives of his friends, carefully concealed behind a web of lies and deceit, what gall must he have to think anyone out there would be interested, yet he gets away with it due to the fierce honesty and tenderness of what he writes, seducing readers just as he seduces women.  How can that not be infuriating?  And of course it is, as that’s part of the nature of the beast.  Is this really about Philip, the women in his life, or the art of creating, as they are one and the same, blended together into a stream-of-conscious mix of cinematic imagination, where actors help to provide the clarity the story needs.  Reveling in its intimacy, this film has an unusual appeal and is a joy to watch, where Desplechin seems to have been born to film it, with ideas on how to make it gestating in his mind for over thirty years.