Erik Shirai's ESPN-produced Venice premiere follows a year in the lives of several men at ascending and descending stages of their relatively short sumo careers. The title of “Sumo: Spirit Weighs Nothing” is the closest that Erik Shirai‘s documentary comes to a joke at the expense of its subject: sumo wrestling, the Japanese sport largely known in the western world for the ample size and minimal clothing of its practitioners, and not an awful lot beyond that. In all other respects, however, this stately, artfully produced film aims to act as a corrective to such cheap, culturally insensitive perceptions.
Examining as it does the motivations and ambitions of a number of sumo wrestlers, from grand masters to rising stars, through a solemnly respectful lens, the doc finds humanity and even beauty in what can all too easily be comically framed on screen. Indeed, the approach of Japanese-American docmaker Shirai (who previously probed a very different Japanese institution in his popular 2015 doc “The Birth of Saké”) is so respectful as to feel a touch sanitized: smoothed-out and simplified for the benefit of Western viewers, to whose perspective the film is mostly tailored. More unsavory aspects of the sport — including controversies over hazing and match-fixing, not to mention its ongoing exclusion of women from competition and ceremonies — are swept aside, while the compelling fact of its declining popularity in Japan is only passingly addressed.
Only before the closing credits roll is it revealed how few yokozuna (the name given to men achieving the highest rank in sumo) this century have been homegrown, as Mongolia and the U.S. step into the breach. Shedding more light on such matters would provide a richer context for the film’s reverent celebration of sumo tradition, but many viewers will still find it an illuminating and exquisitely mounted study, ennobling the sport with the sheer, studied splendor of its imagery, captured alternately in atmospherically high-contrast monochrome and tea-stained sepia tones. Produced by ESPN Films, it will doubtless find a dedicated broadcast and streaming viewership following its premiere as the opening film of Venice’s audience-oriented Spotlight competition.
Early on, the camera observes a group of rookie wrestlers, training at the Tokyo stable of 62-year-old Master Sakaigawa, as they collectively recite a pledge to the sport: “We shall uphold our responsibility and duty to to sumo; we shall uphold a strong heart, kindness and courage.” This is followed by a droll shot of trainees all putting their freshly laundered thongs out to dry: For all its earnestness, the film is not without offhand humor. In the house of Sakaigawa, we meet Hiradoumi, a 24-year-old upstart tipped for big things in the ring (or dohyō, to use its proper term), and a great hope for continued Japanese representation in the sport’s top tier. In the same stable, and younger still, is teenager Yonezawaryu, still learning the ropes, and battling doubts over his long-term commitment to sumo after witnessing firsthand the extreme, potentially fatal, physical toll it takes on the body.
At the opposite end of the career scale is Mongolian-born Terunofuji, who at the time of filming was the only practicing yokozuna in sumo, a 10-time title winner considering retirement after 14 years in the sport, five of them at the very top. He is spoken of as a veteran, positively godly in status, though he’s only 33 years old. Age, however, doesn’t mean quite what it does to civilians in a realm where so much transformational strain is placed on the body, and Terunofuji’s is beginning to fail him.
He’s now married with a son — it’s hard not to wonder if, at the end of his reign, he thinks it was all worth it. It’s one of a few questions that this handsome, sober documentary is too polite to ask. But it does convey the grand, challenging physicality of sumo, which to many of its students qualifies as an answer in itself.
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