By Kim Voynar Voynar@moviecitynews.com

Sundance Reviews: Cutie and the Boxer, Fallen City

Cutie and the Boxer

Cutie and the Boxer is the story of Noriko Shinohara, a talented artist who sacrificed her own ambitions to support her temperamental, brilliant, alcoholic husband, famed “boxing” painter Ushio Shinohara, and how she finally stands up for herself after 40 years of marriage to finally pursue her own art instead of merely assisting her husband with his.

The film begins by showing us 80-year-old Ushio struggling not just to stay relevant but to establish his lasting legacy in the field of art, but shifts gears as Noriko — who four decades ago came to the United States to study art, met the much older Ushio, and promptly gave up her own aspirations to marry and support him– begins to work seriously for the first time on her own artistic effort. Noriko’s work is a series of drawings called “Cutie and Bullie” that depicts her struggles in her long relationship with her husband; her drawings are honest and emotionally raw; she uses them to gently express both her long-dormant anger and resentment, and to find her own voice as an artist.

Ushio and Noriko live in poverty, struggling to pay their rent, even as a representative from the Guggenheim comes to talk to them about purchasing one of Ushio’s works for their permanent collection. The gallery show of Ushio’s work that opens the film doesn’t go well, with not a single work being sold. Ushio continues to work, and Noriko to assist him as she always has, while Ushio puts Noriko down in countless small ways, referring to himself as the artistic genius and her as his less-gifted helper. Clearly, this is a long established dynamic between the two, but as Noriko expresses herself more and more through her drawings of Cutie and long-held resentments start to unfurl, she starts to speak up for herself, to demand that Ushio acknowledge her contributions to their relationship.

As Ushio prepares for another gallery show, the seeds of a plan grow in Noriko’s mind: to show the gallery owner her own work when he comes to see Ushio’s, in the hopes that finally her own talent as an artist will be recognized. And so it is. The gallery owner proposes a joint show of the husband-and-wife’s artist’s work, forcing Ushio to really see his wife’s abilities for the first time, and this is where Cutie and the Boxer shifts gears into something deeper and more universal.

Ushio studies Noriko’s drawings carefully, and we watch, fearing that he’s going to take his wife’s hopes and ambitions and crush them. But you can see on his face when he’s looking through her drawings a recognition both of the talent on display there, and, for the first time, an introspective understanding of his wife’s perspective on their long history. He makes jokes about the way Bullie represents him, but he cannot really argue much with their relationship as Noriko represents it. Through Noriko’s Cutie and Bullie drawings, the two of them finally aspire, after 40 years of her supporting him, to reach a place of better understanding and equality in their relationship and their artistic lives. Love is complicated, and Noriko conveys this with anger, yes, but also with gentle humor and compassion. “Cutie hates Bullie?” Ushio hestitantly asks his wife, as if fearing the answer. “No,” she replies. “Cutie loves Bullie. Very much.”

Cutie and the Boxer is a beautifully made film, as one might expect a film about the art world to be. There is vividness of color here, and contrast between the pair’s struggles in the real world and the way in which they express themselves artistically. Like all artists, including no doubt many of the filmmakers with films at Sundance, for Ushio and Noriko the financial struggles of an artist being able to survive while still creating are a constant source of tension, but there’s never a time when either of them says, well, we’re not getting rich of this, so we should give it up and get a steady job to pay the bills. They fight and they struggle, but the art and being able to keep creating it remains at the forefront of their relationship through it all.

Above all, this is Noriko’s story, about a talented young girl with artistic ambition who came to the US to become an artist, chose to subvert her own dreams to support her husband in his, and finally, four decades later, found a way to stand up for herself and forge her own path as an artist. Ushio and Noriko’s sometimes volatile relationship reveals the complexity of a long-term marriage between two talented artists, and the pull-and-tug between them as they stick it out through the bad things and find a way to make it work, together.

Fallen City

The quiet, thoughtfully paced Fallen City is a moving documentary about the town of Beichuan, which was completely leveled by a devastating 2008 earthquake. Director Qi Zhao, who previously produced the excellent doc Last Train Home, uses the rebuilding of Beichuan here less as a story about resilience and moving forward, and more as an allegorical tale about the controlling Chinese government using the rebuilding of the town as a bright and shiny PR opportunity to tout the staunch resilience and determination of the Chinese people.

Qi spent four years tracking the trajectory of this larger story through the lens of three interwoven smaller stories of survivors of the earthquake and how they move on: Mr. Peng, whose 11-year-old daughter lies buried somewhere in the rubble of the middle school, struggles with how to help his devastated wife go on while dealing with his own deep grief over their loss; Hong, a rebellious, listless teenager who lost his father and now has only his unsupportive, controlling mother, who seems more concerned with his grades and lack of obedience than with recognizing and helping her son move through his grief; and the jolly middle-aged Mrs. Li, who cares for her paralyzed mother, finds a taste of bureaucratic power in the aftermath of the quake in her job as a community organizer in the temporary village of housing constructed for the survivors.

All of these stories are interwoven with the Chinese government’s effort to rebuild Beichuan and use it as a model for overcoming adversity after disaster, while perky Orwellian voices touts the government’s progress with unintentionally ironic cheeriness, assuring the survivors – and the rest of the country watching – that this shiny new Beichuan will be safe, beautiful and culturally rich; this assurance is mostly lost on the survivors, many of whom have loved ones irretrievably buried beneath the slabs of concrete of their devastated town, but they all struggle to move forward, however mired in their grief they might be. Bit by bit, over the four years Qi takes to shoot the film, the shiny new apartment buildings and business district and town square of the model city that’s being built for the surviving residents gradually grows to overshadow old Beichuan, and eventually the survivors are no longer allowed into the old city even to properly mourn their dead. You’ve had your time to grieve, the government seems to be telling them, and now it is time to put that behind you and move on.

As the new city nears completion and the survivors complain about both the sterility of their rebuilt city and the high cost of being able to get an apartment there, an unexpected twist in the film’s third act underscores and questions the benevolence of the Chinese government as a servant of the people, revealing that even amid disaster and rebuilding, greed and human nature are at work.

Fallen City feels at first like it’s going to be one of those “deliberately paced” films that we see a lot of at fests, but the way in which Qi deftly weaves these intertwined stories and his use of some lovely nature imagery as allegory for fragility, rebirth and survival serve to lend the film a deeper and more poetic meaning. Layers of profound grief, staunchness of spirit and instinct for survival come together to reveal the stories of these three survivors whose stories we see here; their stories in turn become allegory for all those who lost their normal lives and loved ones when the earthquake shook their city down upon them. While you can rebuild walls and buildings, rebuilding the human side of what was lost is considerably more complicated.

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One Response to “Sundance Reviews: Cutie and the Boxer, Fallen City”

  1. Alex says:

    I saw the movie in 2013. Two weeks ago I drove through the town and I recognised it immediately. The heart on the wall, seen on the picture in your article, is one of the things I remember strongest.
    Many broken walls are still visible in the valleys. Some historical buildings nearby have been rebuild.

Quote Unquotesee all »

It shows how out of it I was in trying to be in it, acknowledging that I was out of it to myself, and then thinking, “Okay, how do I stop being out of it? Well, I get some legitimate illogical narrative ideas” — some novel, you know?

So I decided on three writers that I might be able to option their material and get some producer, or myself as producer, and then get some writer to do a screenplay on it, and maybe make a movie.

And so the three projects were “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep,” “Naked Lunch” and a collection of Bukowski. Which, in 1975, forget it — I mean, that was nuts. Hollywood would not touch any of that, but I was looking for something commercial, and I thought that all of these things were coming.

There would be no Blade Runner if there was no Ray Bradbury. I couldn’t find Philip K. Dick. His agent didn’t even know where he was. And so I gave up.

I was walking down the street and I ran into Bradbury — he directed a play that I was going to do as an actor, so we know each other, but he yelled “hi” — and I’d forgot who he was.

So at my girlfriend Barbara Hershey’s urging — I was with her at that moment — she said, “Talk to him! That guy really wants to talk to you,” and I said “No, fuck him,” and keep walking.

But then I did, and then I realized who it was, and I thought, “Wait, he’s in that realm, maybe he knows Philip K. Dick.” I said, “You know a guy named—” “Yeah, sure — you want his phone number?”

My friend paid my rent for a year while I wrote, because it turned out we couldn’t get a writer. My friends kept on me about, well, if you can’t get a writer, then you write.”
~ Hampton Fancher

“That was the most disappointing thing to me in how this thing was played. Is that I’m on the phone with you now, after all that’s been said, and the fundamental distinction between what James is dealing with in these other cases is not actually brought to the fore. The fundamental difference is that James Franco didn’t seek to use his position to have sex with anyone. There’s not a case of that. He wasn’t using his position or status to try to solicit a sexual favor from anyone. If he had — if that were what the accusation involved — the show would not have gone on. We would have folded up shop and we would have not completed the show. Because then it would have been the same as Harvey Weinstein, or Les Moonves, or any of these cases that are fundamental to this new paradigm. Did you not notice that? Why did you not notice that? Is that not something notable to say, journalistically? Because nobody could find the voice to say it. I’m not just being rhetorical. Why is it that you and the other critics, none of you could find the voice to say, “You know, it’s not this, it’s that”? Because — let me go on and speak further to this. If you go back to the L.A. Times piece, that’s what it lacked. That’s what they were not able to deliver. The one example in the five that involved an issue of a sexual act was between James and a woman he was dating, who he was not working with. There was no professional dynamic in any capacity.

~ David Simon