In the movies, at least, Macau seems as far away from a real city as you can get, a futuristic dreamworld of neon reflected on water, of shiny Emerald City-style architecture, an Eden of gambling where you could just as easily lose your soul as your shirt. In Edward Berger’s floridly stylized drama Ballad of a Small Player, Colin Farrell plays a compulsive gambler who’s on his way to losing both. He goes by the name Lord Doyle, though he’s hardly a lord, and he’s not even a Doyle. He favors velvet jackets worn with open-collared shirts, a jaunty silk scarf at the neck, a disguise that allows him to prowl the casinos of Macau like self-appointed royalty. But not only has he done some pretty bad stuff in the process of building that façade; he’s on a terrible losing streak, and the casinos have stopped bankrolling him. “I’m a high roller on a slippery slope,” he says in a jittery voiceover in the movie’s opening minutes. You’re poised to spend the rest of the movie watching him tumble down that resolutely unglamorous hill.
But something else happens: while he’s sweating out a horrific loss at the baccarat table—his opponent is formidable senior citizen known as Grandma, played by Deanie Ip—a casino employee of incomparable elegance steps forward to help. Dao Ming (Fala Chen, a grounded, understated presence) offers Doyle an advance, with steep interest; as he weighs the offer, he orders a bottle of Cristal and splits before paying the tab. She gazes after him sympathetically: “He’s a lost soul,” she tells Grandma dreamily, though Doyle wants none of her pity.
He does, however, need her help, and she’ll appear again in his hour of need. (It turns out that she, too, has sins to atone for, and debts to pay.) Meanwhile, a persnickety bank investigator, played by Tilda Swinton in a frizzle of red hair and clompy shoes, approaches Doyle with a serious charge. He’s not just a lovable bumbler with a gambling addiction; he has committed…
