This past Saturday, Zachary Heinzerling won the directing award for his work on Cutie and the Boxer, the story of struggling artists Ushio and Noriko Shinohara. The pair met in New York City in the 1970s and married soon after. Both working artists, they have endured years of financial struggles as Ushio and Noriko have not achieved the success they have hoped for on a commercial level. Ushio is known for his boxing paintings, which he makes by dipping his boxing gloves in paint and punching designs on a canvas. Noriko is also a visual artist. Though quiet and more reserved, Noriko steals the entire film through her moving story of a woman named Cutie that shockingly parallels her life with Ushio and feeling overshadowed by him. After 40+ years together, Ushio and Noriko still get on each other’s nerves and poke fun at each other, yet they are still so much in love, which is refreshing to see in a time when so many marriages don’t make it past five or six years.
Between the Notes 