Love is a roar.

Cutie And The Boxer
Zachary Heinzerling 2013 USA
Documentary

Cutie is the artist Noriko Shinohara. The Boxer, also known as Bullie, is her overbearing, extroverted husband Ushio, so named because of his tendency to create avant-garde artworks by covering boxing gloves in paint and punching it onto a canvas. Unfortunately, perhaps due to the lack of demand for such pieces, most of them have never sold and until now he has been unwilling to allow Noriko to develop and potentially sell her own, despite it being arguably far more commercial and marketable. He even goes so far as to insist that she is merely his assistant and that "the average one has to support the genius" in most relationships. For her part, Noriko creates cartoons based honestly around their forty years of marriage, her disappointment at the way her life has played out and Ushio's alcoholism, which it's outright stated has been passed down to their (now adult) son. Frankly, it's hard to see how they've stayed together for so long. Late in the film Ushio flies to Japan at the request of a prospective buyer and Noriko seems fine, and even happy, on her own, and readily admits that the silence left by his absence is like a revelation to her. And yet, when he rings the door bell upon his homecoming she rushes to him, like a child eager to see a returning parent. By the end of the film he finally admits that he couldn't get by without her and when we see home movie footage he's shot of her dancing happily the reason for their enduring if mildly troubling relationship becomes obvious. It's a tender, humane portrait of the power of love that, despite showing us almost every part of their life, never feels intrusive, director Zachary Heinzerling sensibly staying strictly off-camera and never asking questions directly. As such the story unfolds sensitively allowing us licence to be a sort of silent observer, both to their struggle and their devotion, and also to the joyous sight of them meeting a buyer from the Guggenheim Museum who is so ludicrously pretentious she teeters on the brink of utter cliché. Even the lack of much of a conclusion works, Heinzerling sticking to Ushio's own phrase "It won't be true if it has a happy ending."