Vulgaria is the first Hong Kong film to be covered in this blog since I started writing extensively about movies earlier this year, an indication of how rarely we watch them nowadays.I’m not entire unaware of director and writer Pang Ho-cheung’s body of work however, having watched various of his films including the “Love in a Puff” duology.

Pang appears to be one of the most talented of the city’s new crop of directors with I think a special knack for making films which are distinctively Hong Kong. He’s also a writer who doesn’t shy away from foul language (Love in a Puff has a Category 3 rating purely due to this). Vulgaria then could be seen as a distillation of all things Pang. It’s a profanity-laden, highly meta look at Hong Kong’s film-making scene today.

To be completely honest, I wouldn’t have been able to make heads or tails of this film without English subtitles. A large number of the jokes involve Cantonese wordplay, which are only made harder to understand when performed using affected accents. Of note here is that the vast majority of the humour here is purely verbal. There’s very little use here of sight or physical gags.

Then there are the frequent references to the Hong Kong film industry. Some of these are explained in-context such as the connection between Siu Yam-Yam and a classic soft porn film of the 1970s. Others may make sense only if you’ve watched the films they reference, such as Hiro Hayama essentially playing himself. But there are those that may be downright obscure. My wife had to explain to me that the protagonist’s ex-wife is played by actor Chapman To’s real-life wife, which probably explained why they had better chemistry than with the younger and sexier Dada Chen.

My favourite part is how the film itself is a metonymy of the film that is being made in the film. This allows Vulgaria to get away with some glaring pacing problems and even omissions. It’s impossible not to see parallels between the slapdash, ad hoc plot of this film, clumsily framed as a talk delivered by the protagonists to film students, and the chaotic process of the film within the film being made. Of course, there are implausible exaggerations: it’s doubtful that Pang ever needed to run illegal gambling dens disguised as film sets to earn extra money while not filming. But some aspects may be stranger than fiction: Vulgaria was apparently filmed in only 12 days.

The end result is incredibly offensive and, yes, vulgar. It is funny, but it is also hard to avoid feeling guilty for finding it funny. At the same time despite some odd choices (poking fun at mainlanders’ eating of exotic meats feels passé) and some uncomfortable moments (such as a drawn-out monologue about patenting a masturbation technique), Pang’s brilliance shines through. You can think of it as a metaphor for Hong Kong cinema in general: low-budget, a shadow of its former glory, crassly commercial and low-brow, but also inventive both in finding cheap solutions problems and new things with which to amuse audiences.

China’s cinema has already overshadowed Hong Kong with its grand epics and big budget action-adventure films. But in films like Vulgaria and perhaps the McDull series, Hong Kong has demonstrated that it can still carve out a niche of its own. That such films push against the limits of Chinese censorship to help solidify a Hong Kong identity that is distinct from the mainland only make them more interesting. Vulgaria may be vulgar but it’s still fine cinematic art.