A turbulent 40-year marriage, how expats navigate New York, a woman emerging as an artist and what happens when the bohemian life becomes the bohemian senior-citizen life: All of these are woven into this engrossing documentary.
Director Zachary Heinzerling spent several years filming Japanese avant-garde artist Ushio Shinohara and his wife, Noriko, throughout their daily lives. Ushio, 80, is known for his “boxing” paintings, which he composes by donning sparring gloves and pounding the paint into the canvas.
But he never quite made it, and he’s had plenty of time to accumulate resentments. So has Noriko, who met her husband when she was 19 and he was 40. She rapidly had a child and found her own ambitions subsumed by his. Now she’s gaining recognition for her “Cutie” drawings, which graphically recall her up-and-down life with Ushio.
All that footage has been organized into a compact, graceful story arc.
The friction between a couple of still-struggling artists sounds rather depressing, but in fact the film is often funny; it shows that love is present in even the couple’s harshest exchanges.