Both of the subjects offer a rundown of some of the things they know about the other, accompanied by a whimsically quick montage illustrating each bullet point. Ree unfolds this strange but true story using some techniques more often seen in scripted fare. They fit together like puzzle pieces that have been dinged but not fatally damaged.
But as it turns out, they’re both on the level, these wounded creatures with matching mile-wide dark streaks.
The painter and the thief full#
When Kysilkova asks Nordland to sit for a portrait as a way of making amends, you might assume she is full of shit, as well - or at least that she’s come up with a cunning way to finagle more information out of him. When Nordland tells Kysilkova he took the paintings because “they were beautiful,” you might assume he’s full of shit for so flatteringly framing what he did as an act of radical art appreciation. Nordland, rakish and battered and covered in ink, is a junkie who claims not to remember what he and his accomplice did with either the swan painting or the other work they took, having been on a four-day bender at the time. One of the paintings that was stolen by Nordland from that Oslo gallery, and that becomes a kind of bookend in Ree’s film, depicts a dead swan curled amid reeds like a precious keepsake cushioned in decorative wrapping. Kysilkova is a Czech artist who came to Norway to start over, one whose style is naturalistic, even as her subject matter tends toward the morose. Kysilkova and Nordland are intent on sharing another sort of vulnerability - of seeing each other as unguardedly as possible, to the point in which more fleshly communions feel unnecessary. As the film goes along, however, it starts to feel essential to the pair’s continuing coexistence. I just saw purely, like, a naked soul.” This attempt to transcend the carnal feels at first nigh-implausible, as Kysilkova starts sketching, then painting, then photographing Nordland in ways that are incontestably sensuous. “There was no way I could see the thief in this guy. “The moment I met him at the courtroom, I really sort of fell in love with him,” Kysilkova informs her boyfriend, Øystein. But there is something remarkable about how neither of these fetchingly melancholic Europeans, nor their respective romantic partners, ever appear to acknowledge what seems like an obvious facet of the intense pull between them. I don’t mean to besmirch the spiritual connection between Barbora Kysilkova and Karl-Bertil Nordland with unwelcome carnality.
But alongside these elements is always the steady thrum of another question, one that sometimes grows so insistent it seems impossible that everyone onscreen can continue to just pretend it isn’t there: Are these people going to fuck or what?
The Painter and the Thief is an examination of the intersection between inspiration and self-destruction, and of a rapport so deep and instantaneous it feels like evidence of the existence of a soul. But this isn’t a mystery, and the focus instead turns toward an exploration of how the dynamic between victim and perpetrator quickly shifts into that of artist and muse. The story begins with a crime in an Oslo gallery, where one of the film’s subjects steals a few works of art by the other subject of the film. There’s an unacknowledged tension at the core of The Painter and the Thief, a deliciously absorbing documentary from Norwegian filmmaker Benjamin Ree ( Magnus) - a tension that’s unignorable even as it’s buried by emotional pain and channeled into acts of creation and appreciation. Karl-Bertil Nordland and Barbora Kysilkova in The Painter and the Thief Photo: Neon
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