Cult Pics and Trash Flicks: Vulgaria (2012)

Cast: Chapman To , Ronald Cheng , Dada Chan
Director: Ho-Cheung Pang
Country: Hong Kong
Genre: Comedy
Official Trailer: Here

Editors Notes: The following review is a part of Matthew Blevins weekly series Cult Pics and Trash Flicks. Vulgaria opens September 28th in select cities.

Vulgaria is one of those films that would be difficult to pin down in any conventional sense as it plays with genre conventions and audience expectations with ease, comfortable in its own genre-busting fourth-wall-shattering meta-elements as it tells the unconventional story of its schlubby “Category III” film producing protagonist. It sets out to antagonize both the audience and government censors from the first nostalgia drenched frames. Before the opening credits have rolled and the protagonist has been introduced we can already see that this is the work of a director enamored with the complicated mistress of the art and craft of film and the endless compromise and sacrifice that it takes to create films, even on a micro-budget scale. It relishes in its irreverence from start to finish, and its brilliant use of self-reflexivity gives us an invaluable snapshot of the current independent film game and the importance of social media and viral marketing to ensure a small budget film’s ultimate success or failure.

…comfortable in its own genre-busting fourth-wall-shattering meta-elements as it tells the unconventional story of its schlubby “Category III” film producing protagonist.

It begins with an audience being seated as a film producer tries to get their attention with the distracting stragglers as they interrupt both the audience observing the film and the audience attending the lecture within the film. Our affably frumpy protagonist, Wai Cheung To (Chapman To), antagonizes both audiences for their distracting shuffling, but as a producer of trash films he knows how to exploit an audience to get their attention immediately. He broaches the taboo to the clear visual discomfort of the professor that is interviewing him, beginning with a far-fetched but effective analogy that draws comparisons between film producers and pubic hair, claiming that a film producer’s duty is to ease the friction during the intercourse of filmmaking. With this simple bit of exploitative hucksterism, our protagonist has gotten both the attention of the audience attending the lecture and the audience viewing the film. It is playfully self-aware in this regard, using the more exploitative elements as a catalyst for its hidden intentions as the curtain is finally pulled back, torn down, and blown-up in an unfortunate pyrotechnics accident by the time the end credits roll.

Our affably frumpy protagonist, Wai Cheung To (Chapman To), antagonizes both audiences for their distracting shuffling, but as a producer of trash films he knows how to exploit an audience to get their attention immediately.

To’s enterprises into the copulative acts of financing films take him from pitching product placement for an uncomfortable project to a disinterested room of stuffed suits, to the unspeakable horrors of strange mainland dinner parties with sadistic gangsters, each set of prospective funding sources coming with their own agendas and required concessions before the film has left the tentative planning phases of PowerPoint presentations. The film reel of Vulgaria burns and breaks apart to spare the audience the horrors that the hazy night held, both elevating the taboo without the need to show it while using clever fourth-wall shattering techniques aimed at capturing the attention of the film students in attendance of the lecture and sparking horrific mental images in the viewer with more effectiveness than anything that could have been shown directly. It draws parallels between the lost reels of cinema and the forgotten horrors of the worse kind of drunken nights, namely the ones that leave you itching in uncomfortable places the next morning with only vague recollections of possible reasons why.

Vulgaria is clever and self-reflexive in ways rarely seen in cinema, and in its daring techniques and frenetically astute observations about the business behind the art creates a film that lives in a fantastical world of absurdity that is paradoxically firmly grounded in reality. What it lacks in shooting schedule and budget it makes up for with audacious imagination and rapid-fire comedy as our Marcello Mastroianni of Category III Hong Kong cinema presses on to see to the creation of a highly compromised version of the original nebulous intentions of the film within a film, ultimately revealing the genius behind his approach and his profound understanding of the way that small films get noticed. The tricks that work for To within the film work for director Ho-Cheung Pang outside of the film, and like Confessions of TWO Concubines, with a little notoriety and help from social media Vulgaria just might find an audience.

Matthew Blevins

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Senior Editor & Film Critic. Behind me you see the empty bookshelves that my obsession with film has caused. Film teaches me most of the important concepts of life, such as cynicism, beauty, ugliness, subversion of societal norms, and what it is to be a tortured member of humanity. My passion for the medium is an important part of who I am as I stumble through existence in a desperate and frantic search for objective truths.