"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 playland where someone's foreignness can serve as a qualified privilege, and their imported currency might allow them to live larger than they'd be able to back home. The film, 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 Wong, though instead of 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."
Set in Macau, the story follows a Western gambler who treats the city as an exotic, neon-lit playground where foreignness affords privilege and anonymity. The protagonist inhabits a fabricated identity as a moneyed British nobleman, Lord Doyle, adopting silk foulards, a narrow mustache, and ocher leather gloves to project status. A tragic loan shark, Dao Ming, enters the gambler's orbit by extending credit to sustain his losing streak. Casino workers and hotel employees accept the gambler's performance so long as his cash holds out. The narrative leans into orientalist tropes and visual pastiche without delivering a substantive subversion of that premise.
Read at Vulture
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]