The Painter and the Thief

Barbo­ra Kysilko­va is a Czech artist who cre­ates large, haunt­ing­ly real­is­tic oil paint­ings. She pours her whole self into her work which is pow­ered by an obses­sive atten­tion to detail and includes depic­tions of her own abuse at the hand of past lovers.

Hav­ing recent­ly relo­cat­ed to Nor­way with her lov­ing boyfriend Oys­tein Sten­em, who iden­ti­fies in her an ​“attrac­tion to some­thing destruc­tive” she finds her­self adrift in Oslo, deep in debt and des­per­ate for approval. Two of her key paint­ings, Chloe & Emma and Swan Song, are stolen in broad day­light by a man who spent hours metic­u­lous­ly remov­ing each nail from the frame in order to not dam­age the can­vas. She is affect­ed and intrigued by this strange theft.

The thief is a heav­i­ly tat­tooed and earnest man named Karl-Bertil Nor­land. He is quick­ly caught and, after the tri­al, they agree to meet and he express­es deep remorse for the act while remain­ing unable to recall details of the caper as he was so out of his mind on drugs. He can give her no dis­cernible motive beyond, ​“because they were beau­ti­ful”. From that moment a bond is formed between the two, some­thing akin to both kin­dred spir­its and artists and muse.

Direc­tor Ben­jamin Ree exam­ines this theme with gen­tle curios­i­ty, nev­er push­ing the sub­jects to probe this dynam­ic too force­ful­ly, but rather allow­ing it to slow­ly unveil itself. The film cap­tures a moment where she presents him with a por­trait of him­self, and his silent reac­tion runs the gamut of shock, joy and uncon­trol­lable sob­bing. With­out words we under­stand so much of his pain, his self-loathing and the sig­nif­i­cance of see­ing him­self lov­ing­ly immor­talised as an object of beauty.

The film nev­er spec­i­fies his trau­ma, rather it focus­es on his poten­tial. He was an aca­d­e­m­i­cal­ly gift­ed stu­dent who went on to be a BMX cham­pi­on and worked with chil­dren with spe­cial needs. In his self-neglect he has become the worst ver­sion of him­self. ​“My defects grow in the dark and die in the light of expo­sure,” he says. His drug addic­tion and repeat­ed self-iden­ti­fi­ca­tion as just a ​“junkie” is not only over-sim­plis­tic but woe­ful­ly inaccurate.

The film doesn’t direct­ly posit that this has any sig­nif­i­cance beyond the sub­jects involved, but it is a sto­ry about so much more. What is the point of jus­tice after all? What if we meet those who wrong us with rad­i­cal empa­thy? What is the pur­pose and the heal­ing poten­tial of art? Where does addic­tion and obses­sion inter­sect? And as Oys­tein puts it, ​“What is the prac­ti­cal emo­tion­al risk of car­ing for some­one who can­not take care of themselves?”

There are no easy answers. The path to redemp­tion is dif­fi­cult and messy. The pow­er dynam­ic between artist and muse is com­plex and unhealthy, even between these two peo­ple who har­bour the best of inten­tions. It is made all the more bleak by the pale blues and dark greys of the Nor­we­gian land­scape; they seem to exist in a qua­si-Nar­nia where it is always win­ter but nev­er Christ­mas. Despite all that, this film leaves you hope­ful, inspired even, Could such pro­found kind­ness and deep emo­tion­al con­nec­tion exist out there for all of us?