Small, Slow but Steady

A few years back, Dar­ius Marder’s Sound of Met­al depict­ed the dif­fi­cult adjust­ment of a drum­mer to life with­out hear­ing, leav­ing behind an artis­tic field so depen­dent on sound and sight work­ing togeth­er in uni­son. A more mod­est offer­ing in many respects, though sim­i­lar­ly strik­ing with its own ampli­fied sound design and near-total lack of music, Japan­ese dra­ma Small, Slow but Steady presents some­thing of an ath­let­ic 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 calm and col­lect­ed film 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 film to be a fair­ly stan­dard adap­ta­tion of the book, but cru­cial artis­tic licens­es are tak­en right off the bat. One is that the main char­ac­ter, beau­ti­ful­ly played by Yuki­no Kishii, is more of a fic­tion­alised stand-in for Oga­sawara, instead named Keiko Ogawa in ear­ly onscreen text. The oth­er key change is that Keiko’s sto­ry has been moved to the COVID era, the film begin­ning in Tokyo in Decem­ber 2020.

The explic­it pan­dem­ic-era set­ting could plau­si­bly have been, in part, to min­imise the shoot’s cast and also avoid fuss­ing with accu­rate peri­od details. But the script is smart about 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 face from a very recent box­ing match, but they think she’s been attacked. Keiko is able to explain as best she can, but the cops, fol­low­ing pub­lic health guid­ance, nev­er remove their face masks to allow her to deci­pher what they’re saying.

Else­where, restric­tions on gath­er­ings make for a par­tic­u­lar­ly absorb­ing fight with almost 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 con­fi­dence in fig­ur­ing out why to con­tin­ue fight­ing at all, espe­cial­ly as exter­nal fac­tors inten­si­fy the temp­ta­tion to quit.

Speak­ing on Keiko’s bur­geon­ing suc­cess, the gym’s chair­man (Tomokazu Miu­ra) posits that she’s able to over­come her ​“dan­ger­ous” dis­ad­van­tage in the ring thanks to her intent­ly watch­ing eyes. And much of the plea­sure of this film comes from us doing the same towards Keiko. Cin­e­matog­ra­ph­er Yûta Tsukinaga’s tac­tile 16mm work con­sis­tent­ly frames Kishii as Keiko in such ways as to always per­fect­ly doc­u­ment every grad­ual change in her eyes and face. You can ful­ly under­stand her devel­op­ing melan­choly even while she nev­er artic­u­lates it to loved ones. The approach also means her rare beam­ing smiles deliv­er knock­out hits to the heart.

Lit­tle White Lies is com­mit­ted to cham­pi­oning great movies and the tal­ent­ed peo­ple who make them.

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