Ballad of a Small Player is part of that long and not always illustrious tradition of stories about Westerners who go East in order to wallow in decadence and malaise. Asia, in this equation, is not a place but a playground where someone’s foreignness can serve as a qualified privilege, and their imported currency might allow them to live longer than they would be able to back home. The movie, which screenwriter Rowan Joffé adapted from a 2014 novel of the same name by Lawrence Osborne, seems aware of the orientalist mustiness of this premise without being compelled to subvert it in any meaningful way. Its primary setting is the Portuguese colony turned Chinese gambling capital of Macau, which it portrays as an exotic, neon-lit amusement park. The film is Blade Runner by way of The World of Suzie Wongthough instead of a tragic bar girl, it has a tragic loan shark named Dao Ming (Fala Chen) who ends up in the hero’s orbit when she offers him a line of credit to sustain his ongoing losing streak.
“In Macau, I am a gweilo — a foreign ghost cloaked in invisibility,” its protagonist, played by a perpetually clammy looking Colin Farrell (who’s having a rough fall between this and A Big Bold Beautiful Journey), intones while walking through the bustling streets that serve as the backdrop for his own self-mythologized implosion. “Here, I barely exist. Here, I can be whoever I want to be.” The twist that Ballad of a Small Player does offer is that its main character is indulging in his own form of cultural drag by pretending to be a moneyed British nobleman named Lord Doyle. Doyle wears silk foulards and maintains a trim, narrow mustache that is supposed to read as upper crust and, for luck, carries a pair of ocher leather gloves that he claims are from Savile Row. Whether the casino workers and hotel employees always in motion around him believe this performance is incidental. They’re happy to accept his cash for as long as it lasts, although by the start of the film it’s running out and he’s ducking the enormous bills he’s running up for the penthouse suite and all the room service he’s been enjoying.
Ballad of a Small Player holds back the fact that Doyle isn’t rich or aristocratic for far too long — as if it’s a reveal, rather than information key to understand what we’re watching in this threadbare narrative. Doyle, an alcoholic and a gambling addict who stole a bunch of money from a wealthy client back in the UK and ran off to Macau to live the high life for as long as it lasts, has no plans for what might follow aside from a vague implication that he might eventually kill himself. The movie is the work of director Edward Berger, the Swiss Austrian filmmaker who’s become an unexpected Oscar player over the past few years thanks to his 2022 adaptation of All Quiet on the Western Front and his English-language debut with last year’s Conclave. Both of those were fine, and Conclave got a boost from the camp potential of its intriguing Vatican, but this new movie suggests that Berger isn’t capable of rising above his source material or, in this case, even meeting it. He likes the image of Doyle slowly coming into focus, even though the alcohol he’s constantly consuming is affecting the sharpness of his image onscreen. It’s a literal bit of styling but better than what he defaults to otherwise, which is to plunk the character at the center of a busy wide shot to emphasize how out of his element he is.
When Berger and his cinematographer James Friend zoom in on Doyle on a restaurant terrace in Hong Kong, where he’s fled for the day, it all feels like discount Wes Anderson, an association furthered by the presence in the film of Tilda Swinton as a private investigator in pink wire glasses. Swinton’s character, Cynthia Blithe, should add tension to the film given that she’s tracked Doyle down to demand that he either return the money he took or be deported. But Doyle is already at a dead end when Ballad of a Small Player begins, his luck and funds having already run out, and the film is unable to come up with any reason why his fate is worth investing in. Is it so much to ask for the smallest sampling of the pleasures that Doyle’s traveled halfway across the planet to suicidally gorge himself on? This hopelessly dreary production is intent on capturing only the compulsive, joyless comedown of its main character’s kamikaze choice to blow his life up. And Farrell is one-note, sheened in sweat and stuffing his face with Champagne and lobster, like a man trying to get the most out of an all-you-can-consume buffet before it closes, and losing at baccarat even though it’s his job. His own warped face is all he sees in the shiny surfaces of the luxurious resorts he passes through, even though the whole region is just a fun-house mirror meant to reflect back his own failings.
Nor a portrait of addiction or depression, Ballad of a Small Player is flat, although it still manages to blithely assert that even death is not enough to keep an Asian woman from devoting herself to a charmless white guy — a conclusion that would border on funny if this movie were capable of a joke.
See All
اترك تعليقاً