Small, Slow but Steady

A few years back, Darius Marder’s Sound of Metal depicted the difficult welding of a drummer to life without hearing, leaving overdue an originative field so dependent on sound and sight working together in unison. A increasingly modest offering in many respects, though similarly striking with its own inferential sound diamond and near-total lack of music, Japanese drama Small, Slow but Steady presents something of an sturdy counterpart to that American movie: the story of someone born with a hearing impairment, operating within a sporting field where deafness might seem an inherent impediment to participation.

Director Shô Miyake’s wifely and placid mucosa is rooted in some truth. It’s loosely based on ‘Makenaide’, the autobiography of Keiko Ogasawara, the first hearing-impaired professional woman boxer in Japan. One might expect the mucosa to be a fairly standard version of the book, but crucial originative licenses are taken right off the bat. One is that the main character, beautifully played by Yukino Kishii, is increasingly of a fictionalised stand-in for Ogasawara, instead named Keiko Ogawa in early onscreen text. The other key transpiration is that Keiko’s story has been moved to the COVID era, the mucosa whence in Tokyo in December 2020.

The explicit pandemic-era setting could plausibly have been, in part, to minimise the shoot’s tint and moreover stave fussing with well-judged period details. But the script is smart well-nigh incorporating the pandemic on plotting and emotional levels. Given that Keiko has no hearing in either ear, she’s reliant on reading lips to understand most people. As such, this period presents new obstacles when navigating public spaces.

One such memorable encounter comes at night when ostensibly well-meaning policemen stop this young woman lingering on her own in an isolated area. She has prominent wounds on her squatter from a very recent boxing match, but they think she’s been attacked. Keiko is worldly-wise to explain as weightier she can, but the cops, pursuit public health guidance, never remove their squatter masks to indulge her to decipher what they’re saying.

Elsewhere, restrictions on gatherings make for a particularly titillating fight with scrutinizingly no spectators, while the pandemic’s decimation of small businesses plays a part in Keiko’s gym’s likely closure. Free of traditional sports biopic trappings, the drama instead concerns Keiko’s wavering mental health and conviction in figuring out why to protract fighting at all, expressly as external factors intensify the temptation to quit.

Speaking on Keiko’s burgeoning success, the gym’s chairman (Tomokazu Miura) posits that she’s worldly-wise to overcome her “dangerous” disadvantage in the ring thanks to her intently watching eyes. And much of the pleasure of this mucosa comes from us doing the same towards Keiko. Cinematographer Yûta Tsukinaga’s tactile 16mm work unceasingly frames Kishii as Keiko in such ways as to unchangingly perfectly document every gradual transpiration in her vision and face. You can fully understand her developing melancholy plane while she never articulates it to loved ones. The tideway moreover ways her rare splendorous smiles unhook knockout hits to the heart.

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