Ballad of a Small Player’s ending was crazy. After a series of losses at the gambling table, the protagonist, Lord Doyle, couldn’t think straight. He’d been chugging too much champagne. His feeble heart was sending all those warning signals. And on top of that, he was haunted by the ghosts of his past; all those people he had wronged and stolen money from. Long story short, all was not well in Doyle’s life, and he wanted to make it right. He wanted to pay back his debts, but for that he needed money, and ironically, to arrange money, he needed to win. It’s a vicious circle, you see. And when there was no silver lining left, a woman entered his life.
Spoiler Alert
Dao Ming was a broker who lent money to gamblers in Macau. She could help Doyle, but she didn’t want to help gamblers anymore. The reason being, every time she lent money to someone, it usually ended with them killing themselves. Dao Ming was guilt-ridden herself. In Ballad of a Small Player, one of her debtors jumped to his death, which left Dao Ming devastated. She didn’t want to live a life where she was instrumental in destroying people’s lives, and therefore she drowned herself in the sea on the first day of the Hungry Ghost festival. Yes, this was the same night when Doyle was trying really hard to convince Dao Ming to lend him money, but she had already made up her mind. Before leaving the land of the living, she wanted to spend some time with a fellow human, which she did by sharing a quiet moment with Doyle at the beach. When Doyle woke up on the bench at the beach, Dao Ming had already left. However, if you rewatch this scene, you would find some people near the shore shouting, and it could be possible that they had found Dao Ming’s body, but Doyle didn’t seem bothered to check as he had too many problems of his own. Before killing herself, Dao Ming had scribbled the number “31 07 2005” on Doyle’s palm. It was a date, but Doyle didn’t know exactly what it meant. But if I am to theorize, it could either be the date on which her father died because she stole money from her house, or maybe it was the day when her mother rejected the money she had sent home, hoping to be forgiven if she gave the money back. Ironically, that was the same thing Doyle tried to do in the end, but I will come back to this later.
So, Doyle didn’t know what that sequence of numbers signified. But he did find a postcard of Lamma Island in Dao Ming’s flat. The card had a wooden cabin drawn on it, and later in the film, we saw Doyle visiting that shack. However, the question here is, did he visit the building in reality, or did Doyle imagine it all? Now, if you have seen the film, then you know that Doyle imagined a hell of a lot of things shortly after he had a heart attack. He imagined having lunch with Dao Ming, but we know that couldn’t have happened. It’s possible that Doyle died in that restaurant and everything that we saw on screen after his heart attack was nothing but him trying to make sense of a life spent in vain during his dying moments (or thinking about how his life could have been while he was stuck in Buddhist Hell or Naraka). Or, as the ending of Ballad of a Small Player suggested, Doyle did survive the heart attack and somehow managed to make it to Dao Ming’s cabin on Lamma Island, where he used the number to unlock the padlock on the shed and found two bags filled to the brim with money. Later, he used the same money to have a winning streak in Macau to become the luckiest gambler in the world. But that seemed too far-fetched to me. I mean, it felt more like the story Doyle’s friend, Adrian, had told him. When Doyle went to take some money from Adrian, he narrated to him a story of a gambler who woke up in the afterlife and won every single hand in the casino. Doesn’t it resonate with what Doyle actually is? He died of a heart attack and then woke up in the afterlife to win every hand so he could pay back his debts? However, if we consider the possibility that Doyle died in the restaurant, then it’s hard to explain how he found out about Dao Ming, because this revelation struck him at the very end of the film. Maybe Doyle knew about her death from the very beginning, and his mind just blocked out the information because he wasn’t ready to accept the truth.
I believe what actually might have happened was that Doyle survived his heart attack and found the money Dao Ming had hidden inside the house. But Doyle was too guilt-ridden to use that money and lose it all. He imagined winning every hand he played at a casino to make it big, just like he had always dreamt of. Those two bags had been lying in the room while Doyle was fighting with the demons in his head. And when he was finally satisfied with his victory, he decided to give back the money he had stolen, thinking Dao Ming would forgive him if he paid her back. How naive. In Ballad of a Small Player’s ending, he went back to the Rainbow Casino, where Grandma’s revelations about Dao Ming’s death eventually brought Doyle crashing back into reality. It’s true that this whole “imagination-mixed-with-reality” situation had helped Doyle to recover from his addiction to gambling, but it was impossible for him to settle his debts with Dao Ming. But then he remembered his last interaction with Dao Ming, and believed that he might not be able to pay her back, but there was a way he could pay his last tribute to the woman who showed her the right path in life.
On the night Doyle had gone out with Dao Ming, she’d told him about the Ghost Day when people burned offerings to the dead. Dao Ming was the only friend Doyle had. It was the first pure relationship he had made after ages, and he couldn’t just let her go. He eagerly wanted to settle his debts so he could mend his relationship with Dao Ming, even though he was now aware that she was long gone. On Ghost Day, Doyle came back to the temple and burned both bags of money to make an offering to Dao Ming. If we believe that the money Dao Ming had hidden in her shack was real, then it could be possible that it was the same bundle of cash that she had sent to her mother, but she refused to take it and returned it to her. Out of guilt, Dao Ming had never used it, she’d just hid it, trying to forget about things she had done in the past. But the thing with the past is, the more you try to run away from it, the faster it hunts you down. Dao Ming always blamed herself for her father’s death. He died of a broken heart because Dao Ming stole money from her own parents. And in the present, every gambler she lent money to took their life, which might have convinced Dao Ming that she was cursed by the Hungry Ghosts. In order to escape her demons, she killed herself, and I believe when Doyle stole the money from her, he was haunted by the same ghosts, which eventually made him realize that gambling’s like the Hungry Ghost. The more you feed it, the hungrier it gets. And the only way to starve it is not to feed the evil anymore and just walk away or burn it all down. If you believe that this is what actually happened, then in a way, Dao Ming’s death kept Doyle from destroying the rest of his life. By burning that money and giving up gambling, he gave Dao Ming the peace she had been yearning for in the afterlife. That’s an optimistic way of looking at that ending, in my opinion. However, I would love to know your thoughts and theories on the ending of this mind-bending film. So, feel free to share them in the comments section below.
