Ballad of a Small Player (2025)

'Reinvention' is perhaps the key word on the poster below.

As we were watching it the word 're-jigging' popped into my head — a re-jigging of one of my favourite contemporary novels, a result of which a lot of what I took to be the meaning of the story has somehow fallen away.

Lawrence Osborne's literary 'meat' was wrapped up in a complex exploration of how the gambling addict's compulsions might intersect with specifically Chinese notions of chance and the superstitions surrounding greed. In that context the 'ghost story' element makes a lot of sense, which it kind of doesn't here in the adaptation.

'Lord Doyle' tells us that as an outsider in Macau he is a gweilo, a Cantonese slang term for ghost man or foreign devil. Yet ironically in this Edward Berger (Conclave, All Quiet On the Western Front...) film, not only are all the interesting underlying ideas displaced by visual and performance pizzazz (an odd combo of Wong Kar-wai and Wes Anderson-lite), the native inhabitants of this city have become distinctly ghostlike.

Are extras so expensive over there?

Berger seems to be going out of his way to not duplicate the novelist's fascinating insights into the Macau gambling culture and its clans and outside the casinos he appears to want to limit the number of Chinese people he might show as inhabiting this environment.

This is especially true of the sequence on the island of Samma, here just a home floating in isolation on the sea, but in the book a community (and a cuisine) with which the protagonists are seen to interact.

Screenwriter Joffe has also significantly boosted another non-local character, that given to Tilda Swinton as cartoonish PI Blithe. I can see how this helps avoid the mechanism of flashbacks, but this role seems whimsical and feeds into a finale where Reilly is offered a measure of redemption within a sequence where the film appears to struggle to find a tonally worthwhile conclusion.

So whatever the merits of this movie, and it does have a handful, they aren't the merits of the novel*, and I think this is a good enough novel to deserve more than 'reinvention' by Netflix.

* When first published it was described as one of the best ever English language works of fiction about contemporary China. Berger's film is only very incidentally about China.