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Twenty four hours of four amateur women boxers as they step into the ring for the first time.
“Down, But Not Out!” is a raw and ambitious documentary that lures you into the world of amateur boxing. Making use of a strictly black-and-white format, the director, Miguel Gaudêncio, shows in 70 minutes, the 24 hours leading up to a championship in which a group of adolescents will fight for the first time. It almost seems like a pastime for the prolific and multi-award winning director, who was born in Mozambique and by the age of 30 had already made more than two hundred music videos. Now at the age of 43 and with a portfolio of commercials for companies such as Coca-Cola and Mercedes, a feature film and two other documentaries on his back, he shoots this piece over a limited amount of time. And he was actually shooting another documentary simultaneously (“No excuses” 2015)…just for the record. Miguel Gaudêncio lives a fast life but his editing on “Down, But Not Out!” is slow.
The opening titles already foreshadow that in this journey, you will have to wait, this is a long one, going deep down to the roots of boxing. A visit into the factories where future heroes are molded is accompanied by an electronic soundtrack that leaves a lot to be desired. But it takes time to get from the ring to the masses, “it’s a long way to go.” For some of these young athletes, boxing is a way to release their stress, for others, an elegant sport to be performed with the most sportsmanship possible, shaking hands after every combat. What looks clear is that nobody goes there to lose. And that is what this documentary is about. They all go to win.
The director brings us into their reality, with long and persistent sequences as they get started and credit themselves to join the tournament. He pays a lot of attention to all the formalities, showing them from different points of view and full of detail. I assume it would almost be torturous for the intended audience of this documentary to witness those minute details, considering that audience’s predisposition to boxing. Plus, we all get enough of this bureaucratic stuff in real life.
But Gaudêncio is smarter than that – through his use of a tireless camera, he manages to create a link between characters and spectator. This link will later lead to recognizing them in the ring, even through the face gear they wear, and being able to empathize with every hit and every time they take a punch. By showing dissected and uninteresting fights where none of our known characters will fight, he manages to slow down your inner clock in order to appreciate the later fight and the characteristics of boxing, in addition to being able to present you intimate moments of preparation, where our group of adolescents flirt with each other and get ready for their turn.
His mission, to make us secretly create a relationship with them, gets accomplished, once one of our followed fighters steps into the ring and we suddenly find ourselves, fists-clenched, suffering with them. In that very moment, the director wisely changes the perspective and shows how the fight looks though the opponent trainer’s eyes and we realize that we just became a fan, one in the crowd.
It is here that Gaudêncio and his fellow cameramen, Sebastian Mucha and Pawel Sroka, are unfortunately not able to deliver us a beautiful and stylized picture of black-and-white boxing, despite their hard efforts. Instead of that, we get a raw look that almost gives off whiffs of their sweat but lacks originality. The director’s choice to use background noise throughout the fights confuses the audience, and its overexposed images make it look more like a humorless version of “A Day at the Races” than “Raging Bull.” The Polish original version doesn’t make it any easier to follow even though the dialogue is never too relevant.
At its core, this documentary deals with the concept of failure. And as such this is its only victory. Unable to deliver a proper argument, it rather deals with a slow-building and persistent idea that every fight leaves a winner and a loser. For a black-and-white documentary, it certainly lacks grey areas. Its attempt to show the interaction between female and male boxers is only reached on an affectionate level, rather than digging into the reasons and consequences that joining this violent sport implies.
Without having entered a ring once in my live, there are some words that still resonate in my mind, that clearly withhold the meaning of boxing for those fighters: ” “It is about entering the ring, to accept the challenge. You will get some sleep and in the morning you will see that this is important…and you will want more.”
