“All the Crows in the World” is the sophomore short by Hong Kong director Tang Yi. It tells the story of Shengnan (Chen Xuanyu) who gets a glimpse of the nightlife when she visits her hostess-cum-prostitute cousin who entertains a group of men. The movie won Palme D'Or for a short film at the 2021 Cannes Film Festival.
“All the Crows in the World” is screening at Vienna Shorts
From the first neon lit and highly artificial frame, “All the Crows in the World” makes clear that is a bizarre and weird short, with characters doing and saying things that seem to make no sense. The purposefully detached and alienated acting by the cast and the rapid, and at times, perplexingly rapid editing, heighten the strange aesthetic of the short. It is all so surreal and strange, but never to the point of being annoying or weird for its own sake. That is because everything in this meticulously crafted short works on numerous levels.
For example, a big deal guy starts roaring like a carnivore before going off to have sex with two young women. Listening to him for a few seconds, his minions start doing animal impersonations too. They trash around, bang their chests like gorillas, and make strange noises, both because they want to emulate the leader of their pathetic pack, but also because the prospect of having sex with teenage girls whips them into a frenzy. This is not the first, nor the last time, men are shown as little more than animals in Tang Yi's film. A few minutes earlier, they were giving Shengnan red envelops filled with cash, bidding for her virginity.
The only man who doesn't make a fool of himself by acting like a sex-crazed teen is the quiet guy with a killer hat. He doesn't pick a young girl and instead stays with Shengnan in a gaudily furnished neon lit room, both of them thrown away from the lewd nightlife of oversexed men. Later, he falls in love with a man with the same type of hat. So, if the short is a critique of men, as it most definitely is, it is only of the horny creeps that prey on young women, which in the world presented by Tang Yi is all cis men.
But above all, “All the Crows in the World” is a burning satire of contemporary Chinese culture, its paradoxes and hypocritical nature. We see this best in the red envelopes mentioned earlier. Used by older people to give monetary gifts to the younger during Lunar New Year and other holidays, here they function as a tool to bid for a schoolgirl's assumed purity. A Taoist priest is present too. He also bids for the Shengnan. All this during a lavish feast during a talk about business, money, and other capitalist things. Soon after, the drunken group of businessmen sings a song in praise of Mao Zedong. One cannot but wander how would the dead leader feel about his current followers. Maybe he would condemn them, but more probably, he'd be proud of them.
