The Painter and the Thief: Unsettling Norwegian doc considers art for art's sake, and the possible damage done

By Liam Lacey

Rating: B-plus
A woman artist becomes fascinated and finds a muse in the drug-using art thief who stole two of her paintings, in the Sundance Festival-winning documentary, The Painter and the Thief. 

Norwegian director Benjamin Ree’s unsettling film, which was shot over three years, discloses and hides information in ways that are both artful and contrived as it explores issues of compassion and intimacy, exploitation and self-destructiveness.

Karl-Bertie Nordland, a criminal who became an artist’s troubled muse.

Surveillance footage shows us an Oslo gallery robbery where two large photorealistic canvases were carefully removed from their frames by two thieves.  The thieves are soon identified and arrested. One of them, Karl-Bertie Nordland, says he was too wasted that night to remember much except that he took the pictures because “they were beautiful.” 

That’s enough to spark the curiosity, and perhaps the vanity, of Czech émigré artist, Barbora Kysilkova, who decides she wants to meet the criminal. While the film doesn’t explicitly say she had an art project in mind, she recorded the meeting where he agrees to pose for her. 
Nordland, who has a shaved punk hair-cut, tattoos and prison muscle from eight years behind bars, comes across as mad, bad and dangerous to know. But he has a vulnerable side. His small apartment is neat, with framed prints on the walls. He tells a story of being abandoned by his mother and barely raised by his father. 

Of his first gang of 13, only two are still alive. When he sees the first painting she does of him, wearing horn-rimmed glasses, holding a glass of wine, he howls and weeps at seeing his image turned into art.
Later, the friendship deepens after Karl-Bertil gets in a serious DUI accident, spending most of his recovery period in jail.  Barbora’s Norwegian partner worries about the morality of using this damaged man for her art and about her possible self-destructive tendencies. Barbora came with him to Oslo following an abusive relationship with another man in the Czech Republic. 
In one scene, the film crew follows them into couple’s counselling, where he tells her she’s like a child playing in traffic. “But what if I want to play?” she responds. Her defense is that she’s an art junkie, obliged to follow her intuitions. In later scenes, we see Barbora struggling to pay her rent, and getting turned down by galleries because of the darkness of her work. Are we supposed to infer her work has wandered into a blind maze, or perhaps those are the ups-and-downs of the artist’s life.

Some scenes in The Painter and the Thief feel stagey, including a couple of delayed dramatic reveals. And the characters certainly seem aware of the camera’s presence. 
Seen in its best light though, The Painter and the Thief is a kind of Rorschach test: Do you see a tale of improbable friendship and compassion, or a story of trespassed boundaries and compulsion? Or, is this one of those “bistable” optical illusions, like the vase and the face, where different things are true, moment to moment? 
The Painter and the Thief. Directed by Benjamin Rees. With Barbora Kysilkova and Karl Bertil-Nordland. The Painter and the Thief is available on video-on-demand from May 22.