Flinthart’s rating: 5 out of 5 unwashed sumo underpants

Flinthart’s review: Sometimes I despair of the English-speaking, Hollywood-centric nature of the cinema industry. There are countries and cultures all over the world producing incredible works, yet week after week we focus on the latest eruptions of flatus from Disney, Fox, Sony, and their ilk. Today I’m going to grab you by the nose and drag you to Japan, and an absolute little bloody gem of a comedy: Sumo Do, Sumo Don’t.

In a nutshell, this is a classic “failing sports club full of misfits manages an against-the-odds win as much because of their flaws as in spite of it” story. Seen The Mighty Ducks? Yeah, that sort of thing, except it’s in Japan, and the sports team is a bunch of amateur sumotori from Kyoritsu University. Sumo wrestlers. That’s right: the mostly-naked colossuses who practice Japan’s ancient and storied art of Sumo Wrestling.

The Kyoritsu club is down on its luck. In days gone by they were league champions under talented student wrestler Tokichi Anayama (Akira Emoto) — but those days are well behind them, and now Anayama is a professor, and the only remaining student wrestler is repeat-student and sumo tragic Aoki Tomio (Naoto Takenaka). If the club can’t find new members, it will fold and its history will be lost.

Fortunately for Prof Anayama, the film’s protagonist Shuhei Yamamoto (Masahiro Motoki), a lazy young man who has just scored a job through his family connections, cannot actually graduate without getting credits from Anayama’s class. Anayama bargains with him: Join the club, recruit enough members for the club to participate in a low-key annual tournament, and the required credits will be his.

Ah, but in the busy modern Japan of 1992, few university students are interested in sumo. Rather than strip down to some seriously butt-threatening underpants and practice belly-blasting each other out of a ring of straw, they’d rather take scuba trips to Okinawa or the like. Who’d have imagined it?

Even so, Aoki and Shuhei manage to sign up a few desperadoes, including Shuhei’s skinny younger brother Haruo (Masaaki Takarai), and the obese, terminally shy, and friendless Hosaku Tanaka (Hiromasa Taguchi). After losing the tournament disgracefully and suffering the abuse of the “Old Boys” of the club, Shuhei has a rush of blood to the head and swears that the team will win the next tournament. They manage to recruit an English exchange student named George Smiley (Robert Hoffman), a skilled rugby player, and thus begins the path to greatness…

…or not. So many problems! Tanaka is terrified of violence. Smiley insists on wearing bike shorts under his sumo underwear because he’s embarrassed — and thus will be disqualified from competing. Haruo is a twig. Shuhei is a ball of clueless rage, and Aoki — steadfast Aoki, the one dedicated member of the club — is so nervous about competing that he gets bouts of diarrhoea every time he steps in to face an opponent and inevitably loses by default.

Naturally, over a period of time and training and misadventures, the team gradually gains skill and confidence, eventually confronting their mortal enemies, the champion team of the university league and defeating them which allows them to compete in one final bout for the chance to move up to a higher league.

And do they win? Watch the film. Find out yourself. Look, in review this might seem like a simple feel-good sports movie, but the reality is so much more. Writer/Director Suo brings the laughs with a wonderful, straight-faced deadpan approach to the fundamental silliness of sumo, stripped of its cultural mystique. But at the same time he remains deeply respectful of the art, and by presenting a lovely ensemble of beautifully depicted flaky characters each with their own obstacles to overcome, he delivers a story that is both funny and genuinely sweet and heart-warming.

The film moves at a gentle pace, but never feels slow or lagging. The performances of all the players is fine, but particular credit must go to Akira Emoto, whose Prof Anayama is at once deeply proud of the sumo club and his part in its history, yet sympathetic to the new generation of youngsters who struggle to find relevance in an art associated with the oldest elements of Japanese culture. Similarly, Ritsuko Umemoto’s portrayal of Masako Mamiya, a fat, homely girl so desperately enamoured of Haruo that she joins the club as a manager just to be near him is nothing short of wonderful. Delivering sadness and longing and absolute adoration with a look, a pause, a turn of the head she makes it possible for us to see past her bulky, “unattractive” frame and understand the sweet, fierce young woman within.

The gentle pace is compounded by a sparse, simple but effective sound-track, by Suo’s fine eye for framing a scene, and his willingness to linger, getting the best from the dialogue and the action. The actual sumo-competition sequences are shot very convincingly indeed, and bring real tension to the narrative such that the team’s wins and losses become a genuine emotional experience for the viewer.

The finale — the inevitable team-bonding, the overcoming of personal obstacles, the triumphs and the disasters — plays out along the lines you’d expect, and yet it never feels forced or artificial. This is character-driven cinema narrative, and if you simply sit back and enjoy it you’ll be in for a delightful experience.

If you’re not convinced yet, let me point out that it pulled the Japanese Film Academy equivalent of a Best Film Oscar for the year of its release, and is regarded as a classic in Japan to this day. If that’s still not enough… gahh, it galls me to have to say this, but… it was remade as a television series in 2022 with a couple of the original actors in place, and released on… yes, Disney Plus.

There. Is that Hollywood enough for you? But forget the TV series. See the original film first.

Intermission!

• Even an American Football club?
• Oh, jeez. They never wash those things?
• Those are some of the skinniest sumo I’ve ever seen. I mean — that one guy in the glasses with the bandage probably has to shower with his arms out so as not to slip down the drain.
• Ah, there they are: the Arrogant Championship Team Villains. Perfect.
• Wait… they’re wrestling a bunch of grade school kids?
• Oh! The bike shorts are coming off! You go, Smiley!