The life-long love story of Noriko and Ushio Shinohara, Japanese artists and long-term residents of New York City is going to give you back your faith in marriage. Despite her husband’s alcoholism, single-minded and sometimes self-absorbed creative ambition and poor table manners, Noriko overflows with an unequivocal commitment to the love of her life.
The banality of their 40-odd year marriage is familiar yet entirely unique, shot delicately with handheld intimacy by documentary director Zachary Heinzerling. Noriko reveals the various challenges of life as a struggling artist and woman in love via her animated avatar, Cutie. Her distinctive and striking illustrative style, brutally honest and somewhat grotesque, is showcased in a joint exhibition with her husband in real life but also depicts the couple’s history through animated flashbacks in the film. Gloriously textured close-up frames of skin, hair, splattered paint and pigment starkly contrast the animated plot development, which frames Noriko for once at the forefront of this renowned couple’s life story.
Ushio is a famed sculptor and ‘action’ artist who dons padded boxing gloves and punishes a canvas for two-and-a-half minutes to create his large-scale canvas works. After spending her adult life in her husband’s shadow, Noriko, now in her 60s, finds herself with a room of her own and newfound sense of self. Heinzerling captures some magnificent caricatures of the art world in Ushio’s agent and the Guggenheim representative who visits his studio to see him in action, which are hilariously cringe-worthy compared to the humility and realness of the Shinohara pair. There are so many genuine moments of heart-exploding, honest-to-goodness beauty in this short snapshot of the Shinoharas lives, that the worst part about this film is that it only goes for 82 minutes.
