Love Is The Devil: Study For A Portrait Of Francis Bacon

By: Scott Cranin
In-House Review - Nov 05 2014

Released in 1998, Love is the Devil offers a surreal portrait of an incredibly turbulent relationship that yielded numerous great works of art.

This first feature film from experimental writer-director John Maybury is a portrait of the brilliant, but dangerously self-destructive painter English painter Francis Bacon (played unabashedly by Derek Jacobi). The film opens with a lusty burglar, George Dyer (Daniel Craig), dropping into Bacon's studio from his skylight - and subsequently being invited into Bacon's bed. We learn rather quickly of the artist's taste for rough trade and his submissive, masochistic bedroom desires.

Based around Bacon's life in the 1960s, we learn that his existence was tumultuous, violent and profoundly unhappy. His life revolves around either his studio, his bedroom or the bar. He meets nightly with his cronies and hangers-on (including Tilda Swinton in a brilliantly over-the-top performance) at The Colony Room Club. The scenes are captured exquisitely by a deliberately unfocused camera lens and chiascuro lighting. In bed, we learn that Bacon not only likes his men rough and off the streets, but he enjoys being physically abused as well. All of this self-deprecation and general debauchery, though, is in service of great works of art. So, can it really be all that bad? You be the judge.

Originally released in 1998, Love is the Devil never garnered a large audience, but it has become something of a queer classic over the years - thanks in no small part to the great success of Daniel Craig (a.k.a. Bond, James Bond) and Tilda Swinton in the intervening years. It's a gorgeous, surreal, unique and transgressive effort and we're pleased that a new fully remastered version is now available!

By: Amos Lassen

While this is not a new film, we now have a new remastered edition of it (from Strand Releasing) which makes watching it quite a pleasure. When Daniel Craig was cast as the new James Bond there was a lot of interest in "Love is the Devil" because of his frontal nude scene in the film. The film, itself, is a somewhat short look at the very strange love affair between Francis Bacon (Derek Jacobi), an artist and his model/lover George Dyer (Daniel Craig). Dyer was the model for some of Bacon's most famous works and the film gives us an impressionist look at the relationship between the two men. Jacobi gives quite the performance embodying some of the artist's real quirks including interaction with some very strange friends, brushing his teeth with ammonia, his masochistic bend and his sheer audacity. Visually and through characterization the movie is quite brilliant in its abstractions, darkness and cruelty.

Bacon is presented to us as a man who is disturbed and uncaring but he is also a genius who is not completely in control of himself. He used people, including Dyer, in order to succeed in the art world. However, his life plays second fiddle to the art scene at the time.

"Love Is the Devil," directed by John Maybury takes us back in time to the decades when Francis Bacon presided over a roomful of bohemians?some rich, some poor, some gay, some straight, all drunks. It somewhat documents the life of one of the greatest modern English painters as a dour and bitter ordeal and of a bitch artist.

Jacobi is as usual wonderful and Craig as Dyer is also excellent as he falls victim to Bacon's strange ways as he becomes the artist's muse. As Dyer falls into alcohol and as well as an abusive relationship, we become aware that he is heading toward the final fall-suicide.

Aside from the stars and the appearance of Jarman's muse Tilda Swinton, it is the photography of the film that is outstanding even though the film does appear pretentious at times. Obviously, this film was made for a more intellectual group than the man on the street but all in all, I found it completely interesting.

Looking at a Francis Bacon painting gives a good idea of the man who painted it. In an era of Abstract Expressionism, he defiantly painted the figure, because he wanted there to be no mistake: His subject was the human body seen in anguish and ugliness. We see flesh clinging to the bones of his models, the faces are often distorted into grimaces of pain or despair. His subjects look like mutations with their flesh melting from radiation or self-loathing. His sense of color is strange and uncanny, his draftsmanship was powerful and unmistakable. By and large, his art gave an overwhelming sense of the artist.

There are no paintings by Francis Bacon in "Love Is the Devil." Permission was refused by the estate. It is an advantage to the movie, actually, to do without the actual work; Maybury doesn't have to photograph it devoutly, and the flow of the film is not interrupted by our awareness that we are looking at the real thing. Instead, Maybury and his cinematographer, John Mathieson, make the film itself look like a Bacon. They use filters and lenses to distort faces. They shoot reflections in mugs and ashtrays to elongate and stretch images. They use reflections and I am quite sure that a viewer who has never seen a Bacon would be able to leave this film and identify one instantly in a gallery.

Jacobi's Bacon is a cold and emotionally careless man, a man who occupies a studio filled with the debris of his art. One night while he is , a burglar breaks in through the skylight. The paintings inside are worth millions, but this burglar, named George Dyer knows nothing of Bacon or his paintings-he's looking for something to pawn. Bacon wakes and makes him a deal by telling him "Take your clothes off and come to bed. Then you can have whatever you want."

George stays on as Bacon's lover. Bacon is a masochist in private, a sadist in public; at first he is touched by George's naiveté but eventually he tires of him. George is somewhat neurotic, always obsessively scrubbing his nails. Whether "Love Is the Devil" is an accurate portrait of Bacon, I have no idea.

As for Craig's nude scene, let me just say that he measures up but ultimately the film is neither illuminating even though it is eye opening.

By: dmbnut

It looks like someone went to film school and believed everything that they were told. Maybury obviously tried to use any device possible to make this film look "arty". He completely filed. I love good art films, the ones who may use a specific device to enhance a mood, give feeling to a situation, or to clarify a character. This guy had not clue on what to do with what he was trying to use. Impossible shadows, dialogue, and overused techniques. Please, showing that a person is crazy by having them sitting down and turning a lamp on and off - how often have we seen this. And showing that someone is spiraling into insanity by showing them on a - come on you can guess it - a spiral staircase. For a movie meant to show us a well respected artist there was very little of his art shown. Even Daniel Craig naked could not help this boring and far over-reaching film. Go see a good art film, go see something with Daniel Craig with his shirt off, go see some good art, but at all costs stay away from this movie. Only those people who believe that any "arty" film must be great will say they liked this film, and they will be lying.

By: dick miller

I don't know if this is a well-made movie or not. I do know that I enjoyed it very much. I like the insights into Francis Bacon and the times in which he lived. A nude Daniel Craig doesn't make the movie (doesn't hurt it either. I thought the acting of the two main characters was superb.

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