Small, Slow But Steady Review: An Affecting Celebration of Communal Perseverance

Miyake Shô has said that he wanted Small, Slow But Steady to echo the spirit of Charlie Chaplin’s silent work—to be suffused with love and universal in its appeal. On paper, that analogy feels arbitrary, considering that the film is a drama about a professional female boxer in Tokyo. But when Miyake uses the first silent film-style intertitle to translate the deaf Keiko’s (Kishii Yukino) sign language, the filmmaker’s intentions quite forcefully reveal themselves. Visual, embodied forms of communication, including the rhythms of the moving image, dominate this affecting and deceptively modest film.

Keiko shares a flat with her brother, Seiji (Satô Himi), a lovable slacker whose primary occupation seems to be noodling around with his guitar and MacBook. For Keiko, her still-new passion for boxing appears to have given purpose to a life otherwise in the doldrums. She works as a housekeeper in a large hotel, where she’s among the most efficient workers, but is somewhat alienated from her colleagues. After all, the world is in the grips of a pandemic, and everyone’s masks make it difficult to tell when she’s being addressed.

Miyake and co-writer Sakai Masaaki have cannily transposed the story of the real-life boxer Ogasawara Keiko, on whose memoirs the film is based, into the context of the first year of the pandemic. Beyond Keiko not always catching when she’s being addressed by others, her beloved gym, which is overseen by a kindly man in deteriorating health who’s referred to as “the chairman” (Miura Tomokazu), is in danger of closing. More than just being acknowledged by the presence of masks, the pandemic becomes part of the texture of the world that Miyake builds. Late in the film, one of Keiko’s boxing matches is leant an eerie, foreboding atmosphere by the complete absence of an audience in the darkened spectator area of the arena.

Texture is a key component of Small, Slow But Steady’s enrapturing style. Miyake introduces us to the space of Keiko’s gym with a montage of fists slapping bags and jump ropes skirting the floor—as if to translate the peaceful state that Keiko experiences while boxing into terms for the hearing. And the layered, plosive sounds of the montage are complemented by grainy film stock that plays up the homely, welcoming grittiness of the gym. It also emphasizes the difference between the mental image that the viewer may have of Tokyo as a bustling, techno-cosmopolitan space and the worn-down corner of the city where the story takes place.

Inside the gym, the defensive and closed-off Keiko finds purpose. At the root of her passion for boxing is the way that it allows her to be more direct with others, whether by exchanging blows with an opponent or through the training regimes designed especially for her by the gym’s empathetic trainers, Matsumoto (Matsuura Shinichirô) and Hayashi (Miura Masaki). Recurring sequences of Keiko and Hayashi perfecting a rhythmic routine consisting of a dizzying flurry of punches and dodges establish in beautifully unspoken terms the mutual understanding and intimacy that people can share without the exchange of a single word.

Although it situates Keiko’s big fights at crucial narrative turning points, Small, Slow But Steady avoids the kind of grand incidents and interpersonal dramas that we might expect from a sports film. Whatever tension crops up between characters is quickly subsumed by the overriding sense of warmth for and between members of the community it depicts.

Speaking to conditions that just about everyone in the world can relate to via Kishii’s marginalized but indefatigable main character, Miyake’s film turns out to not be all that dissimilar from City Lights, which, after all, features Chaplin’s best boxing gags. Small, Slow But Steady is one of the first great pandemic movies not only because it dramatizes some very familiar pandemic struggles, but also because it reflects the lessons about mutual support and communal perseverance that we should be taking from them.