Small Slow But Steady (2023): A Tender Character Study of a Hearing-Impaired Female Boxer (Review)

The latest film from Japan’s Shô Miyake, director of 2018’s And Your Bird Can Sing and 2020’s Ju-On: Origins, is Small, Slow But Steady, released to cinemas and Curzon Home Cinema on 30th June. Miyake’s touching movie is a highly original boxing drama inspired by the autobiographical book Makenaide!, the memoir of Keiko Ogasawara, a young woman who refused to let her severe hearing impairment stand in the way of her ambitions as a fighter.

The film stars rising young talent Yukino Kishii as Keiko who, despite the challenges she faces, finds both a second home in Tokyo’s oldest boxing club and success in the ring, winning her first two professional bouts. Though the club’s ‘chairman’ Sasaki (Tomokazu Miura) deems her an unlikely fighter – he concedes that her diminutive stature means she has limited reach and she isn’t the fastest on her feet in the ring (the ‘Small, Slow But Steady’ of the title) – he nonetheless places great belief in her talents. Which makes it all the more painful for him to realise that his gym’s ailing fortunes and his own deteriorating health will mean that he won’t be able to help her progress to the next level. Confused by what the future holds for her, Keiko must nonetheless prepare for her next bout whilst trying to come to terms with why her own existence seems to be one big fight in itself.

Miyake crafts a compelling and moving contemporary story, taking Ogasawara’s story and transposing it into a timeframe that takes in the first year of the Covid pandemic. It’s a canny move which places greater emphasis on the personal hardships his protagonists face. For example, the gym’s days are numbered now as a direct result of the restrictions imposed upon society to curb the spread of the virus, a situation the audience may be all too familiar with, having seen their own ‘second homes’ (be it gym, pub or restaurant) close over the last three years, or maybe having lost a business themselves. We are also asked to consider how the pandemic had made an already difficult life all the more challenging for a hearing impaired person, as Keiko struggles to navigate a world in which face coverings make it impossible to tell when she is being addressed by strangers.

Just how Keiko sees the world as a result of her disability is lent great cinematic effect from Miyake, who is on record as stating that one of his influences in making Small, Slow But Steady was the work of Charlie Chaplin. The use of a silent film-style intertitle in scenes featuring communication between Keiko and her feckless brother and flatmate Himo Satô points to this inspiration, but Miyake isn’t just talking about a technical, nuts and bolts level of filmmaking when it comes to telling this story about a woman whose world is one of silence; there’s a constant moving note to his depiction of this marginalised yet determined figure which, when combined with its universal message of love and support, echoes much of Chaplin’s filmography whilst avoiding the traps of sentimentality he often fell into. Miyake’s regular sound designer Kawai Takamitsu totally understands the assignment here, creating an impactfully plosive soundscape for his director’s montage of Keiko’s gloved fists repeatedly, rhythmically connecting with her trainer’s mitts or the ceiling-swinging bags in her sessions at the gym. As an audience, we are privy to the sounds that our heroine is not and, as so many sequences can pass by without dialogue, it becomes deeply immersive and surprisingly tranquil.

That sense of belonging that Keiko unexpectedly finds in boxing and in the chairman’s gym is evinced in how the film explores her life beyond. Her day job is as a chambermaid in a large hotel and, though she’s efficient and her sign-language exchanges with some colleagues seem cordial enough, she cuts something of an isolated figure presumably because of her disability. It’s clear she loves her brother and it is a bond that is reciprocated, but his fecklessness – forever strumming on a guitar and late with the rent – presents headaches she could do without. Likewise, the wider world is bustling, harsh, unfeeling and inconsiderate; taking time out to stand by shadows of a bridge one evening, she is disturbed by two beat officers demanding to know what she is doing there and why her face is bruised. Retrieving her card that explains her hearing impairment, one cop continue to try to communicate by stupidly raising his voice and over-enunciating, oblivious it seems to the facemask that he is wearing. His colleague meanwhile just walks away, dismissing Keiko as a waste of their time – a small but telling indication of how little importance is placed on a disabled person in comparison to an able-bodied one. Even when strangers are considerate to Keiko, such as the owner of the state-of-the-art gym who uses a tablet to communicate her offer to take her on when the chairman eventually closes up shop, Keiko still feels alienated – this eye-strainingly spotless gym that her trainers Matsumoto (Shinichirô Matsuura) and Hayashi (Masaki Miura) accompany her to is something she feels overfaced by and she looks small and awkward in its space. It is not – and cannot be – the second home she has grown comfortable in. Miyake’s beautifully grainy 16mm cinematography captures the contrast between the faded, down-at-heel corner of Tokyo we have previously seen, with the bright, techno-focused image of the city we are perhaps, as Westerners, more familiar with here for the first time and to striking effect.

Small, Slow But Steady foregoes much of what is familiar to boxing or sports dramas to focus instead on a tender character study that affords leads Yukino Kishii and Tomokazu Miura the opportunity to showcase their skilfull, engaging performances. Kishii in particular is worthy of the highest praise, by virtue of her ability to take this mostly silent protagonist and signify so much of the drive and dedication, the emotions and internal monologue Keiko possesses with expression alone. Indeed, it’s only towards the end of the film, when Chiharu (Nobuko Sendo, who appeared in Miyake’s Ju-On: Origins), the wife of the ‘chaiman’, discovers and reads from Keiko’s training diary that the audience truly becomes privy to her thoughts and experiences. Whilst Miyake does concede to the expected spectacle of Keiko’s climactic bout, the decision to place the action during the pandemic arguably shows how little interest he has in the genre tropes as the crucial action plays out to a darkened arena without an audience and with Keiko’s biggest supporters watching from home on their tablets. Miyake is not concerned with the climactic turning points that populate most sports dramas or the bloated Rocky/Creed franchise, preferring instead to subtly examine how sport has a way of connecting people, however disparate, to build a community or surrogate family.

Mark’s Archive: Small Slow but Steady