“Cutie And The Boxer” is a love story, an art story, a family story and a New York City story — all of them weird, funny and a little heartbreaking. It’s a Japanese story, too. As a young artist in Tokyo in the 1960s, Ushio Shinohara was a rowdy avant-garde painter destined for fame and fortune. Seeking international recognition, he moved to New York City in 1969. Four years later, at age 41, he met 19-year-old Noriko, who had made her own journey from rural Japan to New York in pursuit of her artistic ambitions. The stage was set for love and art to blossom. But something went awry on the road to a bright future.
Filmmaker Quote
“This film started about seven years ago, when I first met Ushio and Noriko Shinohara,” says director Zachary Heinzerling. “I knew something special was there. Ushio is 83 years old, but has the energy and hunger for life of someone a tenth his age. Noriko exudes a calming grace and sly wit, perfectly complementing Ushio’s raucous nature. They live in a space that acts as a shrine to their storied existence: floors coated with years of old paint, drawings stacked on top of paintings on top of books, photos tacked to the walls hinting at past fame. I was immediately engrossed in their colorful world, where the lines between art and life were completely blurred."
“Career disappointments, gender roles, marriage, aging — these are all issues we encounter in adulthood. One of the biggest challenges was to shed light on the love the two artists undoubtedly have for one another, even if they rarely express it directly. I hope that audiences will recognize themselves in Ushio and Noriko’s story and consider their own relationships. My goal is to absorb the audience in the raw spirit and beauty that emanates from my subjects, to open a door onto the creative and very private world where the rhythms of the Shinoharas’ lives play out.”
Despite critical praise for his “boxing paintings” and cardboard constructions and his notoriety in New York art circles, Ushio never found it easy to sell his work. Noriko, meanwhile, put her ambitions on hold to act as Ushio’s assistant and raise their son, Alex. She also had to contend with her husband’s alcoholism and domineering personality. Even today, the couple lives a chaotic, hand-to-mouth existence Brooklyn, as the irrepressible 83-year-old Ushio keeps punching away for his big break. Yet something is changing. Noriko, 62, is finding her own artistic voice through a graphic series about her life with Ushio titled “Cutie and Bullie.”
Fresh from Japan in 1973, Noriko wandered into a SoHo studio in Manhattan and met Ushio. She was smitten by the older artist’s ebullience and confidence and the aura of promise that surrounded him — never mind the aura of alcohol. After their first night together, he was pleased to learn that her parents were supporting her and asked if he could borrow rent money. Noriko wrote him a check. Six months later, she was in love, pregnant and, since her furious parents had cut her off, as destitute as Ushio. Their marriage was not the beginning of a fairy tale, or maybe, in a very bohemian, New York art-scene way, it was.
“Cutie And The Boxer” provides a lively account of the 40 years that followed, full of financial struggle, inebriation, parties, exhibitions and Ushio’s single-minded dedication to his work. He begins paintings by punching at large canvases with boxing gloves wrapped in paint-soaked rags — his version of New York “action painting.” His other signature works are multi-colored cardboard constructions, many in the form of oversized motorcycles. Included in “Cutie And The Boxer” are scenes from a 1979 documentary that called Ushio “the most famous of the poor and struggling artists in New York.” A wrenching scene shows a drunken Ushio boiling in rage and self-pity over the fact that he is so praised, and yet, he says, “I’ve got nothing.”
But the essence of “Cutie And The Boxer” takes place in the present. The octogenarian Ushio has lost none of his fierceness, dedication — and self-centeredness. His life seems, as ever, caught on the edge of success. A visit from a curator of the Guggenheim Museum promises much but delivers little, despite Ushio’s spirited demonstration of his technique. Around the same time, he makes a quick trip to Tokyo, where he sells his works for modest sums: just enough, after expenses, to cover another month’s bills. But Ushio’s family life has not remained static. Son Alex, grown up, is an aspiring painter with an alcohol problem (health issues have recently forced Ushio to give up drinking). And though Ushio continues to demand Noriko’s assistance in his work, insisting that “the average one has to support the genius,” it’s done with the wry sense of a man increasingly beleaguered by his wife’s resistance.
The couple’s barbed banter churns with bitterness, devotion, biting humor, accusations and enduring forgiveness — forming the heart of “Cutie And The Boxer.” They have Rashomon-like recollections of a shared past. Ushio thinks Noriko’s early decision to quit school and start working with him was “the best move she could have made”; Noriko remembers it as “my worst time. After I met him, I became like naked. All my ideas, all my freshness, he took away.” Over the years, Noriko has developed a low-level guerrilla opposition to Ushio’s demands, and she is outspoken now about their lives together. Her retorts often leave Ushio with the guilty smile of a child with his hand in the cookie jar.
Something else has happened. Noriko has been working on a storytelling series of black-and-white drawings depicting the relationship of “Cutie and Bullie,” a thinly veiled, equally funny and painful recounting of her life with Ushio. She feels she has finally found her artistic voice. Ushio alternates between being flattered and being dismissive.
When an upscale gallery plans a retrospective for Ushio—maybe, at last, his commercial breakthrough—Noriko shows the gallery owner her drawings. Impressed, he decides to mount a show of her art in a room adjacent to Ushio’s exhibit. Perhaps to everyone’s surprise, Noriko’s show sparks great interest in her sensual, whimsical “Cutie and Bullie.”
“Cutie is very good at taming Bullie,” Noriko says, “but it’s not so easy taming him in real life. . . . We are like two flowers in one pot. It’s difficult; sometimes we don’t get enough nutrients. But when everything goes well, we become two beautiful flowers.”
Oscar®-nominated “Cutie And The Boxer,” winner of a 2014 Grierson Award for Best Cinema Documentary and the U.S. Documentary Directing Award for Zachary Heinzerling at the 2013 Sundance Film Festival, is a production of Cine Mosaic and Ex Lion Tamer in association with Little Magic Films.
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