It starts as they stick candles into two mini cheesecakes for his 80th birthday. Cutie and the Boxer is a documentary that traces the relationship of husband and wife, Ushio and Noriko Shinohara, who met in SoHo at the respective ages of 41 and 19.
The film begins with Noriko, a young artist recently emigrated from Japan, besotted by Ushio’s immersion in the art world.
Ushio is a Japanese artist who works in sculpture and, primarily, action-painting. His canvases are large and he hangs them against a wall built with a lot of give, like the floors of a gymnastics club. He wails on his canvases, wearing boxing gloves with sponges strung onto them, sopping wet with ink and paint. He wears swimming goggles and the sagging layers of his 80 year-old body ripple with every hit.
The film tells the story of their developing relationship; Noriko recalls Ushio bringing her home to his bed with no sheets and no blankets. She obliges, seeing the barrenness as an emblem for the stingy glamour of the New York she looked forward to knowing. The bed seems fitting for Ushio too, an important player in the Neo-Dadaist movement which founded itself on an aversion to standardized aesthetics of beauty and living.
There is love, but there is loathing too, and she is as detailed about her regrets as a woman on her deathbed.
Noriko initially saw her connection to Ushio as a channel of influence for her own art-making but discovered quickly that their relationship would never be equal; he would always be the one with an established name, and she’d always put him first.
At the beginning, we watch Noriko play the role of Ushio’s assistant; she seems pleasant enough but not enthusiastic.
Later, we see Noriko on a trip to sell some of her own work in Japan; we are invited into Noriko’s own artistic practice, where we discover her discomfort about the amicable subjugation she feels in relation to her husband. There is love, but there is loathing too, and she is as detailed about her regrets as a woman on her deathbed.
We are introduced to her new series of works: a semi-autobiographical comic of sorts wherein she reconfigures her own alter ego, Cutie, to rise above Ushio, Bullie. The work chronicles her youthful ambition, his boisterous, alcoholic behaviour and the things she’s given up and lost over the course of their nearly 40-year relationship.
Using a calligraphic painting technique, the often nude figures of Cutie resemble the plumpish and seductive women drawn by the hand of Titian, the 16th century Italian painter.
Cutie and the Boxer, directed by Zachary Heinzerling, captures Ushio as he works to put together his latest exhibition — one in which the gallery owner has also agreed to showcase Noriko’s new series.
I’ve never seen art manhandled the way it is here. It is clumsy, gorgeous and hilarious, causing us to think about the physical reverence we give to objects according to their perceived value — whether historical, emotional, cultural, and most often economical.
Unlike a lot of visual art documentaries, this film doesn’t feature any interviews about the two main subjects, nor do Ushio or Noriko ever address the camera or the people behind it. They are direct only with each other. It’s at the same time heartwarming and tumultuous — their passion for each other is unfaltering. The narrative blooms out of their everyday life where questions of power, love and success lie somewhere among their collective past and their individual bodies of work.
