By Sam Monks
The Painter and the Thief doesn’t pretend to be anything other than a love story. Its setup is entirely romantic: a Czech artist based in Norway develops a friendship with a deadbeat local man who stole one of her naturalistic oil paintings. There’s no need to wonder why the documentary, directed by Benjamin Ree, was a Sundance darling and an Oscar snub. Two broken people find each other and themselves. Let the nerds watch it on Hulu; it arrives to empathize.
However, in spite of my best wishes, I refuse to relish in the weight of Barbora and Karl-Bertil’s love. Every hug, every quip, and every affirmation appears earnest, yet the movements themselves feel heavy. Everything is genuine and nothing is quite earned.
Take for instance their differing perspectives on the theft itself. Barbora passionately and awkwardly approaches Karl-Bertil in search of intention. Why did this junkie decide to steal a painting and why can’t he remember where he put it? Why that particular painting? Why her? Karl-Bertil on the other hand is less interested in the theft and more interested in the piece of him the theft reflects. He responds to Barbora’s questions with passing sincerity, “how can you understand a junkie?”, and informs the audience that the red roses on his arms signify his lost childhood. It’s immediately remarkable how attune he is to himself, and eventually evident how dismissive Barbora is with the effects of her own. As Karl-Bertil notes,“She sees me very well, but she forgets that I can see her too”.
As a result, their friendship seems thrusted into a transaction: she listens to him and he humors her. In practice, it assumes greater stability. Compared to each’s romantic relationships, their connection is unbothered, probably to a fault. She needs to be tougher with him and he needs to be tougher with her, but there’s so much meaning attached to their friendship that it would seem overzealous to risk it in any way.
In effect, there’s nothing about Barbora and Karl-Bertil to aspire to. There’s no virtuous motivation to be drawn from two people who recognize holes in themselves through their attraction to each other and, therefore, would never rattle the cage for the sake of the other. She’s there with him and he’s there with her but they never adequately embrace being there for each other.
Their love is an aesthetic love, full of presence and void of intrinsically transformative powers. It’s a love story in the simplest sense and in the end there’s meaning in that, if only because they were there together and that must mean something. And perhaps that’s all that matters for the same reason why Karl-Bertil stole one of Barbora’s paintings: “because they were beautiful”.
