Love Is the Devil: Study for a Portrait of Francis Bacon (1998) – Sexy Daniel Craig

Biography of British painter Francis Bacon focuses on his relationship with his lover, George Dyer, a former small time crook.

Love Is the Devil: Study for a Portrait of Francis Bacon (1998)

87 min| Biography, Drama, Romance |7 Oct 1998

6.5Rating: 6.5/10 from 3454 usersMetascore: 6.5

In the 1960s, British painter Francis Bacon (1909-1992) surprises a burglar and invites him to share his bed. The burglar, a working class man named George Dyer, thirty years younger than Bacon, accepts. Bacon finds Dyer’s amorality and innocence attractive, introducing him to his Soho pals. In their sex life, Dyer dominates, Bacon is the masochist. Dyer’s bouts with depression, his drinking, pill popping, and his Satanic nightmares strain the relationship, as does his pain with Bacon’s casual infidelities. Bacon paints, talks with wit, and, as Dyer spins out of control, begins to find him tiresome. Could Bacon care less?

Director: John Maybury
Writer: John Maybury
Country: UK
Language: English
Duration: 87 min
Stars: Derek Jacobi, Daniel Craig, Tilda Swinton, Anne Lambton, Adrian Scarborough, Karl Johnson

 
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Imdb user
This film is a bit of a mixed bag really. It divided people in half-one praising it unreservedly whilst the other deriding it and complaining. Personally, I can understand both aspects but I side with the former group.

The whole film is like a surrealist painting but for me, the most unique scene from an artistic sense was the one in the pub, where Francis Bacon’s circle of friends is introduced for the first time to the naive George Dyer. We see people’s half-faces amidst a cloud of smoke and groggy reflections of featureless silhouettes on the grubby mirrored bar-front which, to me, was the perfect visual way in which to present the assortment of eccentric libertarians whom Francis Bacon counted among his nearest and dearest.

I’ve also read so many complaints about the alleged disjointed nature of the scenes, with the second half of the film being peppered with montages of nightmarish surrealist scenarios that George Dyer finds himself in. Well, weren’t these scenes part of the character that was Dyer? His insecurities and fears were imbued into the very fabric of his relationship with Bacon and ultimately led to his demise. No disjointedness there. Someone mentioned that Tilda Swinton is almost unrecognisable in this film–unrecognisable yes but brilliant none-the- less.

The film on the whole is less about the two protagonists’ lives and more about the nature of a relationship from the perspectives of the two people involved in it. Many found it shameful that Bacon’s influence was not shown more or just that one small episode in his life merited a biographical film. But that’s just it. This is not a biography. The title states: Love is the Devil: Study for a portrait of Francis Bacon. A portrait, not The portrait. This is an episode which speaks simply about a relationship and the universality of the two perspectives that defined it. The only point of objection I had at the end was the fact that very few people had even heard of the film which is easily one of Daniel Craig’s best, not to mention Derek Jacobi.