When 59-year old Noriko Shinohara calls herself "Cutie," you'll want to take her word for it. She grabs the viewer at the opening scene of the documentary "Cutie and the Boxer," which plays out like something from an early Jean-Luc Godard movie: It's early morning, and she's brushing out her long, silvery hair, tying it up into pigtails that offset a surprisingly smooth face. You're already a fan, whether you see the rest of Zachary Heinzerling's documentary or not.
But then you'd miss out on an outrageously wonderful love story between Noriko and her 80-year old husband, Ushio, in the excessively bohemian Brooklyn apartment where they've lived for the past 40 years.
"I need money," says Noriko to Ushio (who goes by the nickname of "Gyu-chan"), in a mixture of Japanese and English. "We need 1,000 for rent and maybe 800 for other things." Four decades of Brooklyn living (in the hip Dumbo district) hasn't washed out Noriko's Japanese-English: "rent" is "rento," and "thousand" is "sauzan" — accent on the "Z."