Review: CUTIE AND THE BOXER Iterates Love Is A Battlefield

Armed with home videos and photos, the doc shows Ushio Shinohara's rocky career as a visual artist. One of the founding members of the Neo-Dadaism movement in the 60s and known for his action paintings (he punches the canvas wearing goggles and boxing gloves with paint sponges strapped on), Ushio came to New York in 1969 and never left. There he hung out with other pop-influenced artists such as Andy Warhol in Greenwich Village, in an era that many romanticize as the golden age of the New York art scene. Seen as important but not commercially viable, Ushio's work didn't really have financial successes. Even his innate optimism and boundless energy sometimes weren't enough to overcome the hardships of being poor. He started drinking heavily. And it was Noriko, an art student and 23 years his junior, who stuck with him and supported him all those years.
 
Then, there is Noriko the artist. Her cartoonish figurative drawings, paintings and accompanying narrative are very much derived from her own life, especially the relationship with Ushio. In the beautiful flash animation sequences, Noriko's alter ego, a pigtailed, forever naked 'Cutie' goes through life's hardships and happiness with 'Bullie' (bull is 'ushi' in Japanese), her boorish artist husband. Asserting herself late as an artist in the Shinohara household, she has her own 'queendom' -- a small space in the loft where she sketches and writes and where Ushio isn't welcome.

It all culminates in their exhibition together in 2010 titled (Love is) Roarrr! in a New York art gallery.
 
Heinzerling gets complete access to the life of the Shinoharas and the result is an amazingly tender, intimate and realistic portrait of a relationship between two artists that is built on respect, understanding, and most of all, love.