Song review The Ballad of a Little Player – Colin Farrell seeks redemption in Edward Berger’s high-stakes gambling yarns | film

TThe vast emptiness of luxury hotels is part of the mystery and spectacle of Edward Berger’s intriguing and intriguing psychodrama; It is about a desperate adventurer and gambling addict, who faces the metaphysical crisis of renewing or canceling his existence by betting everything on a single bet. Screenwriter Rowan Joffe adapts the 2014 novel by Lawrence Osborne, with an ironic title. He wouldn’t have had these problems if he were a really young player. He’s a big player and a big loser, though his smallness comes in other ways.

Colin Farrell plays a professional gambler who calls himself “Lord Doyle”, drifting through the Chinese gambling metropolis of Macau, the Asian Vegas; He is a “gweilo” or despised foreign ghost. Farrell shows us a seedy man with a very stylish mustache and sweats, running up a huge bill at a five-star establishment that tolerates this sort of thing on the implicit understanding that a guest will bet and lose big at the hotel’s casino. Doyle never lets the staff clean his room, so he wakes up every morning drunk in a pile-up of mess.

One night, while Doyle is waiting for his bad plan to play out at the craps table, he meets the charismatic Dao Ming (Fala Chen), one of the unofficial “brokers” or moneylenders who haunt the tables. Their treatment is disastrous, yet Doyle prevents Dao Ming from being beaten by a gambler’s widow who drives him to suicide. They become friends, or even spiritual lovers, a relationship between two ghosts – but by possessing a certain mysterious number, Doyle has – mysteriously – obtained the means of his own salvation or destruction, forced to face his fate as a “hungry ghost”, always devouring and never satisfied.

It’s a neat and interesting device, although Tilda Swinton is in a frankly implausible role as Betty, a cartoonish woman who pursues Doyle and learns of his terrible secret in the UK; Her character and the purpose of her plot are neither compelling in any realistic sense nor particularly funny. Perhaps it would have been better to develop Dao Ming’s character instead.

Berger and his cinematographer James Friend load the screen with blooming panoramas of Macau and its misty waterfront, as well as with strange and sinister interiors; The world of hotels, with their complex grandeur and cavernous spaces, where anonymity is both liberating and oppressive. It’s a film about big moods and grand gestures, undermined by the banal inevitability of loss.