'Gensan Punch': It's the fights outside the ring that matter

Boxing movies typically feature outside-the-ring obstacles. Whether or not the hero wins the big final bout, they must first face whatever stands in the way of possible victory, beginning with fitness and technique, or rather their lack of. Thus, the semi-obligatory training scenes.

Inspired by a true story, Brillante Mendoza’s “Gensan Punch” gives its hero what must be the most fundamental obstacle of all. Disabled from childhood and fighting with a prosthetic leg, Nao Tsuyama (the single-named Shogen) is repeatedly denied a boxing license by the boxing commission in his native Okinawa, which cites the “extreme danger” the leg poses in the ring. That is, he is defeated by stiff-necked officials before he ever lays a glove on an opponent.

Rather than quit, Nao goes to the Philippine island of Mindanao, where licensing rules are looser and he can train at the same gym, in General Santos City (abbreviated as “Gensan”), that raised the real-life champion Manny Pacquiao.

Winner of the best director prize at Cannes for his 2009 film “Kintay,” Filipino director Mendoza gives “Gensan Punch” a documentary-like immediacy and impact, minus macho posturing and bluster.

If anything, Shogen, a veteran character actor who became friends with the film’s real-life model, is almost too soft-spoken and self-abnegating in his first starring feature role as Nao. Righteous rage against injustice isn’t part of his make-up. Instead of pounding the table in the commission’s office, he bows his head and, with clench-jawed determination, goes elsewhere.

Even so, from first scene to last, Shogen exudes a quiet grit that somehow seems true to Nao’s nature and is reflective of his experience as a mixed-race kid growing up without his American serviceman father (glimpsed disappearing up an escalator and out of his life), but encouraged by his ever-supportive Japanese mother (in a ray-of-sunshine performance by Kaho Minami).

In the gym, crowded with young fighters dreaming of escaping poverty, Nao is assigned to Rudy (Ronnie Lazaro), a crusty old coach who is at first skeptical that a one-legged boxer is fit for the ring. But the gym’s smiling owner Ben (Jun Nayra), his kind-hearted wife Mina (Evangeline Torcino) and attractive daughter Melissa (Beauty Gonzalez) are more welcoming. Nao even starts an awkward courtship of Melissa, most of which reportedly — and thankfully — ended up on the cutting room floor.

The story’s heart, however, is Nao’s relationship with Rudy, who becomes his fierce advocate after he realizes that this Japanese guy with the glint in his eye is the real, gutsy deal. But boxing is a brutal sport, as underscored by the knockout death of a fighter Nao has befriended, and Rudy decides to rig the bout that earns Nao his much-coveted license, to spare him the danger of not only defeat but also injury or worse. Once Nao finds out, however, his trust in Rudy is shattered.

“Gensan Punch” does not build to the standard bout that decides everything; instead it stays true to the life of its unassuming model. Also, Mendoza inserts the viewer into the action with a shot-on-the-fly style that is intentionally busy and even chaotic, with random bodies jostling into the frame. But the film also brims with vitality and warmth, giving us Nao’s Philippine (or rather Gensan) experience whole and clear. No wonder the samurai-esque hero finally begins to loosen up and, miracle of miracles, smile.