Photo: Netflix Ballad of a Small Player is part of that long and not always illustrious tradition of stories about Westerners who go East in order to wallow in decadence and malaise. Asia, in this equation, is not a place but a playland where someone’s foreignness can serve as a qualified privilege, and their imported currency might allow them to live larger than they’d be able to back home. The film , which screenwriter Rowan Joffé adapted from a 2014 novel of the same name by Lawrence Osborne,