The Painter and the Thief

One of the most intimate and unlikely documentaries you’re ever likely to see, The Painter and the Thief eavesdrops on the strange, evolving relationship between Czech artist Barbora Kysilkova and Norwegian career criminal Karl-Bertil Nordland — who helped steal two of Kysilkova’s paintings from a gallery in Oslo.

Norwegian filmmaker Benjamin Ree stumbled across the story just after the pair met, not long after Bertil (as he is called) is arrested for the robbery. Barbora (as Bertil comes to call her) goes to court in part to find out what happened to her still-missing paintings, and instead ends up asking the thief to pose for a portrait. As the movie unfolds, she does several paintings of Bertil in her hyper-realistic style — the most illuminating of which is reserved for the film’s conclusion — and their lives become intertwined in ways best left for viewers of the film to discover.

Ree had remarkable access to Bertil and Barbora, as well as to Barbora’s Norwegian partner, novelist Øystein Stene, clearly an indication of Ree’s rapport with his subjects, since they feel free to talk as if the camera isn’t there. (Note that they speak mostly in English, evidently because Barbora’s Norwegian isn’t good.) That closeness also makes Ree protective of them, and their darker sides are revealed only gradually and without much detail.

(Review continues below the photo.)

Bertil and Barbora in her studio in a scene from The Painter and the Thief.

There are some fascinating filmmaking twists (that are not spoilers): Ree gets Bertil and Barbora to narrate one another’s life stories, and he toys with chronology, going backwards and forwards to add layers to the story — not unlike Barbora’s painting technique. Also like her paintings, the film is both beautiful and disturbing, with difficult subjects depicted but left mostly on the surface.

Ree’s filmmaking — no supertitles or omniscient narrator, no interview subjects save for his central trio — leaves many factual gaps, but the film is an emotional portrait more than an investigation. And it has plenty of twists and revelations of its own. The slow pacing is occasionally frustrating, but it’s also a reflection of the filmmaker’s infatuation with both Bertil and Barbora, and he does a superb job of communicating his enthusiasm. He began his film out of his obsession with art thefts, but he ends it with a glimpse of how art can capture complex emotional transactions in a visual language that needs no translation.

Grade: B-plus. Not rated, but PG-13 equivalent. Available May 22 via the Virtual Cinema program on the Fine Arts Theatre’s website.

(Photos courtesy of Neon. Top image is one of Barbora’s portraits of Bertil.)