FILM REVIEW
‘The Painter and the Thief’ Review: An Engrossing Double Portrait
After two of her paintings are stolen, an artist gets to know one of the perpetrators in Benjamin Ree’s documentary.
The best documentary features go beyond the when and how of a given event to plumb the mysteries of what possessed the people involved to do what they did. Benjamin Ree’s “The Painter and the Thief” starts with an odd art theft at a gallery in Oslo in 2015—two paintings cut out of their frames and spirited off by a couple of men, one wearing a hoodie and the other a knitted cap, under the gaze of security cameras. The oddity of the crime lay in the value of the art—relatively low, except to the artist, a young Czech woman who was neither famous nor rich. The beauty of the film lies in the bond she forges with one of the thieves after they’re found by police and sentenced to 75 days in prison. Questions of identity haunt both the victim and the perp—not their names or addresses, but who they are in the farthest reaches of their psyches, and who they may become.
The painter, Barbora Kysilkova, is an open spirit with an easy smile. The brains, so to speak, of the gallery heist is Karl Bertil-Nordland, a hardcore gangster, by his own account, and a junkie with a disordered cortex who doesn’t seem to fit any art-purloiner profile. She not only reaches out to him as a gesture of empathy or generosity, but decides to paint his portrait. She also wants answers to obvious questions. Why did he do it? Because, he replies, he thought the paintings were beautiful. Where are they now? He doesn’t remember. She doesn’t understand how he doesn’t remember. “How,” he says provocatively, “can you understand a junkie who’s been awake for four days and using 20 grams of amphetamine and a hundred pills? That wasn’t me.”
It’s an intriguing response in an ambiguous situation. The man claims to have been a mystery to himself. Who was the thief, then? And why is she drawn to paint him? To know him? She doesn’t pretend to know herself all that well. Still, the attraction is intense, and when she shows him the finished portrait—when he realizes how much she cares about him and sees how she sees him—it’s a slow-building, clearly spontaneous moment of astonishing intensity that a fiction film might have toned down in the interests of plausibility.
A few other moments feel less than spontaneous, more like discussions staged somewhat awkwardly for the benefit of narrative clarity; Mr. Ree began work on the film after reading newspaper accounts of the theft and had lots of catching up to do. (The surveillance footage is authentic. So is video shot at Barbora’s gallery opening before the theft. The thieves’ trial is dealt with stylishly by way of a few courtroom drawings.) For the most part, though, the relationship between Barbora and Bertil, as she calls him, grows on camera from improbable friendship to spiritual love. And not just love in the abstract; when Bertil comes close to killing himself in a car accident, Barbora signs on as his faithful caregiver.
“The Painter and the Thief” is really a tale of two portraits, the one Barbora paints and the one Mr. Ree constructs from the evidence she uncovers in the course of her caring. Together they form the film’s core, and provide a reminder of how perilous it can be to write people off on the basis of who they seem to be. Bertil is, by every outward sign, a self-destructive wreck who, with the help of his best friend, heroin, has dismantled his once-promising life beyond repair. Yet Barbora thinks otherwise. It’s not that she thinks she can fix him. She believes he can fix himself, and the movie makes her case persuasively.
Write to Joe Morgenstern at
joe.morgenstern@wsj.com
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