Today is Ushio Shinohara's eightieth birthday, and his wife Noriko gives him a modest cake to eat with a single candle next to it (shaped like the number "3" because that's all she had) by way of celebration. As a married couple they have never been blessed with too much money, and a lot of that is down to their lifestyle choices: they are both artists, or should we say they are both struggling artists, and have been trying to make a living from their pieces for most of their adult lives, but the fact remains the market is none too open to what looks less like the work of professionals and more like the work of outsider artists. But they will not be deterred...
The more cynical could observe they would have had a better quality of life if they had forgotten about following their individual muses and decided to pack it all in for an actual paying job, yet part of what made Cutie and the Boxer compelling was the impression they could no more give up their unsteady vocation than they could give up eating, even if giving up eating would have offered them more spare cash to improve their lot, albeit for a limited time. Art documentaries have much the same questions hanging over them, but the most pressing one is, for the masses of unconvinced, what's the point to this? What worth does it have? And the images of Ushio's work failed to convince everyone.
We do see him manage to secure the odd exhibition or two, which proves someone sees value in it, but then again very few wish to buy the efforts, which mostly consist of paintings he has created by punching paint onto the canvas (hence the "Boxer" part of the title), grotesque motorcycles crafted from cardboard, and more abstract paintings awash with colour. But what of Noriko? After all, she is creative as well, and after a good fifty years or so of hiding her light under a bushel, one prompted by having to look after the difficult and at times alcoholic Ushio and the son they had, it seems she may be finding her own voice in a series of what look like cartoon panels with a distinct autobiographical flavour. That it has taken so long is one of the quiet sadnesses of the documentary.
Other sadnesses include the fact that their son has evidently grown up extremely ill-adjusted to life, and is probably an alcoholic himself, and the fact that if Noriko had never met Ushio on her fateful arrival in New York City to study art, then she may have blossomed sooner, and possibly more expansively than her partner. Ushio seems incapable of ploughing a different furrow in his work, mostly repeating the same ideas over and over though you could argue he has reached an age where he's unlikely to change his tune, so you can understand why his creations have failed to support him adequately - as far as we can see he spends most of what funds he has on paint and canvas, the cardboard being something he scavenges from what people throw away.
Therefore some regarded Cutie and the Boxer - Cutie was the surrogate character Noriko uses in her paintings who gives voice to her thoughts - as a somewhat tragic tale of a woman who met a man twenty years older as a nineteen-year-old and misguidedly fell in love with him, then found herself trapped in a marriage which wasn't doing her any good as she was forced to mother both her husband and the child she had with him, though you didn't need the artwork angle to view that as the story of many a relationship, particularly one which lasted as long as this one did. Yet director Zachary Heinzerling was not inviting us to be too judgemental as he took an observational approach rather than an investigative or accusing one, even if the latter was what spending time in the central couple's shared existence brought out in many audiences. It mostly depended on whether you thought the results of their suffering were worth it: Noriko says at the end she wouldn't change a thing about her life, which may be the saddest part. Music by Yasuaki Shimizu.
