Small, Slow But Steady
Directed by Shô Miyake
Running time: 1hr39 | REVIEWED BY GUY LODGE
Yukino Kishii in Small, Slow But Steady
There’s a tiny, Hollywood-trained part of the brain that watches Small, Slow But Steady and waits, even hopes, for it to swell up and turn into Rocky — it’s an underdog boxing drama, after all, and isn’t that the way these things are supposed to go? Keep those thoughts quiet, if you can, for they will not be sated; get Bill Conti’s iconic theme out of your head, for there’s no music here at all. Japanese director Shô Miyake’s lovely, bittersweet portrait of a deaf woman boxer is playing its own game, or fighting its own fight, and its rewards aren’t euphoric, but they’re substantial nonetheless.
For Small, Slow But Steady isn’t primarily focused on one sportsperson’s trajectory to victory (or otherwise) but on a working-class community labouring simply to stay in play. Sport here isn’t a dream but a livelihood, each person’s survival dependent on another’s resilience: Miyake and co-writer Masaaki Sakai are as interested in the trainers, the carers, the gym managers that support young pugilist Keiko as it is in Keiko herself. She’s close to a real-life figure, her story lightly adapted adapted from a memoir by Keiko Ogasawara, though the film doesn’t assume the importance or spotlighting focus of a biopic. Keiko’s gender and disability may make her an unusual protagonist within the genre, but equal attention is paid here to what makes her ordinary, from her knackering day job as a hotel cleaner to her everyday, and eminently relatable, crises of confidence.
It would be a stretch to say this is a sports movie for people who don’t like sports — its boxing and training scenes, beautifully edited by Keiko Okawa, have a genuinely pulse-quickening rhythm — but it is one for people interested in life around sport, in the ways the mentality of the athlete affects their ability just to be, even to sit still from time to time. As a deaf person, Keiko (played with watchful intensity by Yukino Kishii) already feels slightly outside the world occupied by others — sparse, artfully selective sound design conveys that isolation while also stressing sensory advantages denied her in the ring — and her vocation can seem like yet another thing people can’t understand about her: even her mother, who wonders if Keiko shouldn’t move on, satisfying herself merely with having gone pro.
And yet her team sustains her: the scruffy, financially embattled boxing gym where she trains is maybe more her first home than her second, the COVID-aggravated threat of closure as urgent a threat as any lost match. The film’s highs are small, hard-won victories of human connection, the prize another day to fight.
SMALL, SLOW BUT STEADY (2023) Written by Shô Miyake, Masaaki Sakai | Shot by Yuta Tsukinaga | Edited by Keiko Okawa
Now in cinemas and on Curzon Home Cinema