Colin Farrell in Edward Berger’s movie

Ballad of a small playerThe last movie of Conclave The director Edward Berger has two main things that do.

One is a main performance of Colin Farrell. He plays Lord Doyle, a scammer and a game addict that hides in the casinos of Macao; Since much of the film spends on the edge of psychological or physical annihilation, one wonders what could be running out of that could be worse than this.

The other is a striking style that evokes influences as broad as Wong Kar-Wai and Lanthimos Yorgos. Photography director James Friend creates a purgatorial kingdom of disorienting angles and neon lights that are too sick to be beautiful, the nightmare underlined by the Volker Bertelman score. Add Lisy Chrisl’s costumes, with their colors and sticky accessories (a pair of peptomagin dual loop glasses

Unfortunately, these strengths are working at the service of a story too weak to support them, a unsatisfactory combination of Threadbares tropes, predictable turns and a thin study of wafers. Ballad of a small player It has a lot of flash, since it corresponds to the story of a man whose daily clothes consists of velvet suits jewel tone and silkshd. But you can’t find much substance under consciously cheap glamor.

Adapted by Rowan Joffe (28 weeks later, The American) From a Lawrence Osborne novel, the film finds Doyle already on the verge of destruction. In Macao, he tells us through the voiceover, his condition of Gwai lo (Foreign) gives you a kind of invisibility: “Here, they hardly exist. Here, I am the one to be.” But as quickly discovers, even that superpower has limits. The Hotel del Casino in which it is housed is threatening to kick it unless it resolves its astronomical invoice. A stubborn researcher, Cynthia (Tilda Swinton), is hot in her tail, anxious to recover the money she cheated on a rich old woman in the United Kingdom

He, of course, has no cash to pay anyone for anything, being the type of player who cannot find a lost bill in his pocket without immediately blowing it at the nearest Baccarat table. His body is falling apart, undone by stress or decades of bad habits: it is perpetually slippery in sweat and accumulated by occasional episodes of weakening internal pain. It is not surprising that the guy cannot stop flashing the images of himself jumping from a very high building, even if he insists that he would never do it because suicide is “a permanent solution for temporary problems.”

Farrell’s precise comic moment and the lack of vanity causes Doyle to look no matter how low it is exhausted, or how exasperating his behavior becomes. (In my Telluride projection, the crowd began to moan things like “Do not do it, baby” when he finally gets a victory just to contemplate another poorly advised bet). But even his considerable charism cannot respond to the persecution of why we are following this type at all. The script makes it the “hungry ghost” archetypal, so driven by greed that can never be satisfied, but does not really develop its psychology beyond that; He is all meaningless impulse and without complexity.

Anyway, the fate of Doyle changes when he meets Dao Ming (Fala Chen), a mysterious worker of the casino who sits down for the cunning warnings of the grandmother (Deanie IP), a hilariously rudely rudely roller roller who frequents his table. (“I can burst his balls with one hand,” he mocks the grandmother when he looks at Doyle for the first time). Although he immediately owes Dao Ming money, after having tried to dinner a glass bottle in his establishment, he seems moved by his promises that once he finally obtains a great victory, he will pay not only his debts but of it but from it.

But the semi-romance that should raise the plot to a higher level of emotionality has, however, the opposite effect. Chen is lovely like Dao Ming, a tender heart who insists that “it is not too late” so that Doyle becomes the best person you see in him. But the will of the character to go out to the extremity for a fucking one who barely knows is still a puzzle, even after a complete scene in which he offers his own bitterness of agrude background through an explanation. Until the end, it feels more like a symbol or a plot device than a person with any interior of Ballad of a small player Only another iteration in that tired trope in which western ones go to exotic foreign lands for self -discovery trips, in the midst of superstitious locals that exist only to help or hinder them in their paths.

It is not that the movie does it much better for Doyle himself. While, in the end, it undergoes some type of internal transformation, is driven by something closer to divine providence than any deep personal epiphany. He, like all the other characters in the film, seems to bow to the whims of a screenwriter who wants to reach a specific ending, instead of one who cares a lot about what is happening within these people. For a film about a man who leaves from the inner vacuum, Ballad of a small player terribly hollow rings.