Many great film titles dilute their characters into basic descriptors: Stalker, The Graduate, Bicycle Thieves, The Passenger. All these examples attempt to define human lives by their occupations or by one simple aspect of them. They fail however, pointing instead to complexities and contradictions that go far beyond these adjectives.
We find instead that people are unknowable. This truth is unsettling but is also the reason why these titles, even in their bluntness, convey such an infinite sense of mystery and wonderment.
Benjamin Ree’s The Painter and the Thief introduces itself with a similar kind of understatement. Fundamentally a human interest documentary, the titular Painter and Thief are connected in a way that is immediately obvious to us.
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Barbora Kysilkova, the Painter, creates and exhibits large, naturalistic oil paintings that are often slightly strange and disturbing. Karl-Bertil, the Thief, is one of two men who audaciously stole two of her greatest paintings from an Oslo gallery.
The film wastes no time in showing these two meeting and quickly developing a mutual attachment. When Barbora asks Karl why he chose to steal those two pieces, he replies, ‘because they were beautiful.’ He clearly has a love of creativity and art that belies his status as a criminal and drug addict. We find that Barbora’s life too is fraught with unspoken addictions and traumas. They find in each other a way to escape these circumstances and to create moments of incredible intensity. Though, like her paintings, there is an undercurrent of danger that permeates through even the most regenerative scenes.
Another key undercurrent to the movie is that of doubt and suspicion. Does Karl really not remember what happened to the painting? Is Barbora the warm and kind-hearted friend that she seems or rather someone who is attracted to his destructive lifestyle, and, as her boyfriend suggests, wishes to use it as a subject with no regard for how problematic this could be? As far as human interest goes, The Painter and the Thief gets the first thing right: these are interesting people.
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I had never seen Barbora’s paintings before, but she clearly has something of her countryman Edvard Munch’s lucidity and instantly expressive iconography. While Karl’s tendency to get himself into horrific accidents and to disappear for long periods of time clearly frightens her, she is keen to take pictures of a wound that he sustains, comparing it to the nail in Christ’s hand.
The moral aspect of this does not bother her, she says, because it is in the past. To some viewers her work would be mythologising these horrors, devaluing their violent presence in the real world.
In many ways she occupies the typical space of the genius artist in cinema. She has a childlike need for distraction that threatens to kill her relationships; she is reticent and awkward – sometimes painfully so. We know that she and Karl are so much more than their suffering.
Still, there are many scenes of him subsiding into old habits, dreadfully reinforcing the anxiety that he is severing any worthwhile relationships in his life. The struggle is moving beyond the past and actually accessing what makes recovery worthwhile. It is often very hard to see them achieving this.
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One of the joys of the documentary is its ability to communicate this doubt and frustration. These emotions infect the audience, and Ree keeps us constantly at a distance, letting the two misfit heroes of the journey narrate the story. If anything about this is imposed it is the decision to split these two streams of thought into distinct sections, fracturing the characters and implying that they cannot truly know each other. Moments originally told by Barbora are reprised and brought into question; images and alliances are given a subtle discontinuity and conflict.
This is compelling at first, but does not quite come together. Resulting in a non-linear and character-driven experience that feels the need to provide a structure where it is not needed. Of course, the enigmatic nature of the movie is inherently a little aggravating, and this is no slight against it. But there could have been more sensitivity given to the constraints of the story. As the narrative begins to gain some stability and calm, we are still left with a certain mystery, a wish that Ree would dive more profoundly into the world that is slowly becoming beautiful for these people.