Small, Slow But Steady (2022) © Courtesy of Curzon
Knees bent, chin down, elbows close – the classic boxing stance is about balance, responsiveness, protection. It’s a pose that is echoed in the compact, watchful virtues of Miyake Sho’s glowing Small, Slow but Steady, a highly atypical boxing drama that is less concerned with the glory of the knockout punch, and more with the interior decisions and indecisions that occur long before the punch is thrown, and long after the punch has landed. Rocky it is not.
One swipe against boxing-pic norms: it begins after its underdog heroine, based on real-life boxer Ogasawara Keiko, has already had her breakthrough. Despite being deaf from birth, Keiko (a superbly contained, truculent Kishii Yukino) has recently turned pro as a boxer. She has already won her first professional fight – by a knockout that would surely prove irresistible as a first-act climax to another filmmaker, but which Miyake communicates through terse prologue text shown on screen, over a far more prosaic sequence of Keiko training. At her scuffed local gym, she practises combinations with her trainer, reading his lips, his gestures and occasionally a whiteboard with a scribbled instruction or two, under the fatherly gaze of gym owner Mr Sasaki (played with lovely, worn-to-a-polish dignity by Tomokazu Miura).
This is far from your classic punching-slabs-of-beef-in-a-meat-locker training montage. But Miyake’s restrained approach builds stakes for Keiko without the manipulations of slow-mo or scoring. We don’t need the swagger of ‘Eye of the Tiger’ to know that here beats the heart of a lion.
Even when we do see Keiko in the ring, the off-centre perspective avoids the clichés of the genre, delivering enough actual boxing to appear authentic (at least to an inexpert eye) but mainly focusing on Keiko’s form and face. We see her unexpectedly ferocious expression before delivering a flurry of body-blows. Her shocked, indignant response to a split eyebrow. Her surprise when Mr Sasaki taps her shoulder in congratulation when she’s named the winner in an announcement she cannot hear.
Her worried mother (Nakajima Hiroko), sitting ringside and wincing away from the action, cannot help but wonder why all her daughter has already achieved cannot be enough for her. Why must she endanger herself in fight after fight? She doesn’t under- stand what Keiko gets out of the sport, an incomprehension shared by Keiko’s affable brother Seiji (Sato Himi), with whom she lives in a small, bare-walled apartment, paid for by her day job as a hotel chamber- maid. “Punching and getting punched,” Seiji signs at her over dinner, “It’s insane.”
Her family finds Keiko’s motivations difficult to discern. But so too does Keiko. It is only really at the gym and during her morning workouts by the deserted waterfront, where she’s joined in wordless companionability by Mr Sasaki, that Keiko seems to be in tune with herself, when her silent inner world becomes a source of strength and calm, rather than a place to retreat into. Tsukinaga Yūta’s warm 16mm camerawork is tuned to this perceptive frequency too, finding unusual eloquence in ordinary suburban locations – a pedestrian walkway, a concrete courtyard, a patch of scrubland beside a commuter train route – unromantic places which are not designed for lingering, and which, like Keiko herself, seem to expect to be ignored.
The demons of self-doubt are never at bay. With local developers circling and revenues dropping as the pandemic claims a lot of its business, the gym’s future is threatened. Not unrelatedly, Mr Sasaki, fretted over by his loving wife (Sendo Nobuko), experiences the recurrence of long-term health problems. Suddenly, Keiko’s two major stabilising forces are themselves destabilised, and Keiko, who never displays the driving vocational passion we associate with the pro boxing circuit – or maybe just never allows herself to feel it – no longer knows if she wants to continue with her boxing career.
To fight without the will to win, Mr Sasaki tells her, is to dishonour your opponent. Keiko’s chief antagonist, her wavering sense of self-worth, will not be easily bested. But the tough and tender Small, Slow But Steady tracks a powerful slow-dawning realisation that even after all your support structures crumble, there can still be something left. Call it spirit, call it resolve – it is unique, yet available to everybody. Most boxing movies are stories of individual exceptionalism, but when Keiko finally musters the will to train again it’s not only a victory for her, but a quiet, graceful vindication for the millions of valiant souls who decide, every day, to fight, and so to honour the struggle.
► Small, Slow But Steady arrives in UK cinemas 30 June and will be available to stream on Curzon Home.