Exploring the Connection Of Farrell and Swinton in Their Latest Drama Ballad of a Small Player
On a humid morning in Macau, a blue-and-orange phoenix adorned with over 60,000 flowers emerges from a massive pink Fabergé egg. This proud bird revels in the attention of onlookers as it rotates on a jewel-studded stand to the triumphant sound of clarions, before withdrawing to its shell. Observing this display, you might believe lucky to have chanced upon it at exactly the perfect time. Remain longer, though, and you will discover that hatching occurs each 15 minutes religiously.
It is summer 2024, and Farrell and Swinton are residing here while filming Ballad of a Small Player, helmed by the director and based on the author’s atmospheric 2014 novel about spirits, guilt, and betting. Farrell plays his character, an from Ireland thief who adopts an English voice, uses the alias his title, and hides out at the Wynn Palace, where he maintains a precarious life of drained luxury. After escaped to the city with a stolen fortune, he passes his nights betting at baccarat, a high-risk game of chance no more complex as a flip of a coin. Swinton is the gauche agent, also operating under dual personas (one minute she’s one name, the next another), who has been hired to locate Reilly and recover the money.
The place is a real mind-bender. Almost like living within that giant ornamental egg.
However that disorienting remark could also apply to the city itself. Following 400 years as a colonial outpost, this harbor town south of Guangzhou transitioned into a unique territory of the country in 1999. Like Las Vegas, its casino hub exudes an alluring air of kitsch. Its Cotai Strip is flanked with towering copies of the Venetian bridge, the Parisian landmark and London’s clock tower. Stationed outside the imitation Houses of Parliament is a iconic double-decker in which the footballer – or rather, his digital self – is yoo-hooing from the upper deck in his capacity as ambassador of the hotel brand hotel. “Did you go in there?” Swinton inquires excitedly. “You can find beefeaters doing jazz hands!”
Beyond the Glitz and Sparkle: Deeper Elements in a Dreamlike Environment
Regardless of what that might imply, the region, which has been rarely featured in Hollywood films, is a more serious subject than Las Vegas. Razzle-dazzle live shows never really took off in this place, and its gamblers are too stern to get drunk. Servers carry trays of tea or milk, instead of mixed drinks, across the casino floors. Spirits of a different sort, though, are an essential aspect of the local beliefs, as Ballad of a Small Player demonstrates. In one sequence, Reilly is turned away after the management checks CCTV footage of his latest victory and notices a apparition lingering nearby.
Osborne’s book compares one casino to a “Hans Christian Andersen fairy palace imagined by a small child with a feverish dream”. This is echoed in today’s set: the former hotel, an deserted former resort next to a shop offering “coffee, plants and home goods”. The team has designed by the production designer the artist to amplify its faded grandeur grandeur: ostentatious chandeliers, reflective columns with floral patterns, doorways framed by fringed, red drapes and indoor greenery.
Personas Living in a Realm of Illusion
On his first day on set, the book’s author Osborne is wearing a brimless cap on the back of his head, and moving along on supports after a crash in Bangkok, where he has lived since 2012. The novelist positions him in a canvas chair and gazes appreciatively at the abandoned casino, its gaming tables surrounded by extras whom Berger is actively stirring into a uproar before the next take. There is a continuous hiss as the smoke machine fills the room with its misty vapor.
This artificiality seems appropriate for a movie where most of the characters are posing as someone else. “Guys I encountered in the city would claim to be nobles and counts,” notes Osborne. “Nobody questioned it. Like the baker, who marketed his pastries in Macau. Did he actually hold a title?” In fact, he wasn’t: The city’s famous pastry chef, who passed away in 2006, was a Boots chemist from Ilford in Essex.
Performance Insights and Creative Influences
The crew films a several shots of the lead riding the moving staircase down to the gaming floor, then moving through the game areas as the supporting cast whoop and holler in the background. He is attired in tailored beige trousers, a striped shirt and suspenders, and a spiffy red jacket. The alternating red and green illumination has a jarring, conflicting effect, as though warning him to stop while urging him to go. The colors also add a touch of futurism into the chintzy surroundings: a reminder that Wong Kar-wai shot parts of In the Mood for Love and its forward-looking follow-up 2046 here.
His sleek hairstyle and pencil moustache that gives the actor a hint of roguish, retro charm was modeled by a lineage of gentleman stars: Clark Gable, Errol Flynn, the charmer. Did these shaped his performance? “Not directly,” the actor tells me. “But I’m aware that all I’ve watched or consumed or listened to unavoidably ends up in my work. People have asked me about The Penguin and if I was influenced by Jimmy Gandolfini in The Sopranos. I still have not watched The Sopranos! Yet I know that every gangster I’ve ever seen has found its cataloged way into what I did in that project. Similarly with Reilly, be it individuals with dependencies or people leading lives of abject pretense.”
The actor’s past struggles are well documented, though gambling was not one of them. A few of his insights into the character’s mindset have stemmed from conversing to hotel executives here. “One told me the casino was up $24m the previous night from two gentlemen. I replied: ‘I imagine they were pretty downcast.’ He responded: ‘Yeah. But when they win, they experience equally terrible.’”
