THE PAINTER AND THE THIEF review by Gerald Wright

Directed by: Benjamin Ree
Running time: 1 hour 42 minutes
Release date: May 22, 2020 on VOD platforms
Genre: Documentary in English and Norwegian with English subtitles
Distributor: NEON

The setting is Oslo, 2015.  Two paintings by Barbara Kysilkova are stolen from a gallery.  The thieves are caught fairly quickly, but there is no trace of the artworks.  Hoping to find her creations, Barbara visits one of the thieves at his court trial and ask for the return of the artworks.

This documentary is structured in a double-portrait narrative of the marvelous friendship formed between a Czech painter, Barbara, living in Oslo, and a Norwegian felon, Karl-Bertil Nordland, convicted of stealing her paintings from a gallery.  As Barbara approaches Karl, she is aspired to if he would sit for a portrait.  When Karl agrees, the two protagonists in this story get to know each other better.  What follows over a series of portraits and many years is an extraordinary story of human bonding and connection resulting in friendship.

In this mutual bonding and using a structure that cleverly shifts perspectives, Norwegian filmmaker Benjamin Ree unfolds the fraught lives and vulnerabilities of two souls who come to recognize themselves in the other - the darkness, wounds, compulsions, and self-destructive behavior.  Filmmaker Ree captures the  revelatory moment when Karl, a drug addict junkie and petty crook who has done jail time, first sees his portrait and completely breaks down.  Throughout the film, the understanding of both people and even the stolen paintings, entirely changes.

The film focuses on the artistic cooperation brings the two main characters together in a special way.  They give each other an insight into the shadowy corners of their past.  The film alternately depicts events from a dual perspective, sometimes returning to tell the story through the other person's eyes.  It shows the two protagonists from each other's perspective, so that the resulting paintings conveys a dark atmosphere in places but also moving look at two seemingly disparate fates.  In life, certain aspects of human nature defy comprehension, and yet filmmaker Benjamin Ree materializes Barbara Kysilkova and Karl-Bertil Nordland in a way that is accessible and transcendent.


FILM RATING (A)