Customer Reviews

Love is the Devil: Study for a Portrait of Francis Bacon

5 star:		(12)
4 star:		(9)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

A thief (Daniel Craig) breaks through a skylight and lands in the middle of an artist's studio. His flashlight shows paints and brushes and canvas, and scattered thick on the floor pictures and newspaper photographs of carnage, accidents, executions. Peering at him from a slightly open door is the artist (Derek Jacobi). "Not much of a burglar, are you?" the artist says. "Take your clothes off. Come to bed. Then you can have whatever you want."

The artist is Francis Bacon, one of the great painters of the Twentieth Century. The burglar is a working class, not-too-bright man 30 years younger than Bacon named George Dyer. Love Is the Devil tells of Bacon's relationship with Dyer from 1964 until Dyer commits suicide in 1971.

People probably react to this movie much the same way they react to Bacon's paintings and his life. Fascinated or repelled. Or both. Bacon's view of life is certainly there for all to see. He was an aggressive masochist where pleasure is pain and degradation is arousal. On the way to a boxing match with George, he says that "boxing is such an aperitif for sex. Like bull fighting, it unlocks the bowels of feeling." Bacon's circle of friends are brittle, obnoxious, clever queens, whether or not they are gay. They may accept George as Francis' plaything but not as a serious lover. Bacon is aroused and energized by the perversity of life. "We all have nightmares," he says to George unsympathetically one night. "They can't be as horrific as real life." His paintings are usually grotesque manipulations of the human body, where the body can look like an opened side of beef and a face can look like its been turned inside out. One critic called him the morbid poet of the world of evil. That seems to me to be superficial and ignorant. A person may not like Bacon's work, but his stuff is powerful and fascinating.

Both actors do superb jobs. Jacobi in particular just lays it all out. He gives a performance of self loathing, commitment and precise personality.

The DVD looks great. Unfortunately, there are no examples of Bacon's paintings; his estate wouldn't give permission. If you know Bacon and are familiar with his work, I think you'll find this movie imperfect but engrossing.

John Maybury provides viewers with a creative portrayal of the English painter Francis Bacon. Bacon was fascinated with violence both in his paintings and in his personal life. This is evident from the very first scene in which Bacon confronts George Dyer, the inept burglar who has fallen into his studio. Jacobi's chilling, yet mesmerizing, portrayal of Bacon is seen as Maybury closes in on Jacobi's face as he deliciously anticipates being bedded and dominated by this strange young man. And while the film's frank portrayal of lust and sexual dominance is clearly evident it also explores the life of a man who consciously chose the dark side of life. The performances of both Jacobi and Daniel Craig, as Dyer, are outstanding as is the inventive camera work of Maybury, who mimics the surreal images of Bacon's paintings. Jacobi's performance and voice-over narration help to illuminate this disturbing and fascinating man. Disturbing because he revelled in the violence and pain that most of us abhor and fascinating because Bacon was so unabashedly honest in his approach to life and his work.

One character in this film describes Francis Bacon's art as "portraitures of pain," also an apt description of this movie about the artist and his relationship with a burglar George Dyer, played by Daniel Craig, who falls into Bacon's flat from a skylight in a bungled attempt at a robbery. Completely unfazed, Bacon (Derek Jacob) informs George that if he will take off his clothes and come to bed, that he can have anything in the apartment he desires.

I know precious little about the life of Bacon; but if this movie is accurate, he was not a particularly likeable man who treats Dyer, who comes to care a great deal for him--"I love you, Francis"-- very badly. At times George is his "sorbet between courses." At other times, he banishes him from his sight.

Both actors are excellent in their roles. Jacobi actually looks like Bacon; and Craig, soon to be the new James Bond, gives a fine performance as a "tragedy waiting to happen."

John Maybury, the director, obviously wants the viewer to be reminded of Bacon's paintings since there are many distorted and fragmented shots. Additionally, many of the artist's friends from the bar have very unsymetrical faces. Bacon makes himself up in front of three mirrors. There are several shots where the characters are so close to the camera so as to give a fish-eye effect. There is also a scene where victims of an auto accident are lying in positions similar to those of figures from Bacon's art. For the most part these "portraits of pain" work.

This film is certainly worth watching.

This film is about the famous painter Francis Bacon, specifically his relationship with his lover George. Francis meets George when George is breaking into his studio to rob it. Francis offers George a deal: he can have anything he wants if he sleeps with Francis. This marks the beginning of their tumultuous and unlikely relationship. Francis, although a famous and respected artist, is cold, sarcastic, and often cruel. Aside from George, his only other relationships seem to be a handful of artistic friends who occasionally hang out in pubs together and mostly take turns putting each other down. George, an uneducated boxer, obviously doesn't fit into this world at all. But it doesn't really matter at all to Francis, who sees him mostly as a sexual plaything, as opposed to a real partner. Surprisingly, George falls in love with Francis, and begins trying to win his attention and sympathy in increasingly self-destructive ways.

Visually, this film is very true to Francis Bacon's paintings. It's full of imagery that suggests cages, pain, confusion and psychological torture. As a character study, this film suggests that Francis Bacon was just as disturbed and unpleasant as his paintings.

The life of British artist Francis Bacon was a fragmented story of abuse, disconnection and cynicism, he developed a callous disregard for human feeling seemingly because he was treated similarly as a boy, subjected as he was to the coldness of the British Public School system.
This film chronicles the height of his career during which time he had an initially loving but latterly destructive love affair with a simple and striking east end lad, George Dyers.
The centre of Bacon's world was his grubby, disorganised, slightly sordid, studio flat. A world into which George falls, quite literally, through the sky light while attempting to steal from the artist.
The affair is at first one of passion and caring, George is shown off and spoiled. As it becomes evident that George is in need of simple and tangible feedback to prove he is loved so Francis seems able only to give cruel jibes and provocation based on the irritation of George's needs, thus the seeds of destruction are sown. Francis seeks solice in creating art, the only place he can make some kind of coherant sense of the fragments of his angry emotional world. George, who has almost daily nightmares, has no creative means of dealing with his complicated emotions and reactions to Francis. He can only blot out the pain in a haze of drugs and drink. On the rare occassions he can deal with his demons while lucid he does so by making dramatic and messy suicide attempts.
The film pinacles as Francis is given the honour of being the first British artist since Turner to have a special exhibition in Paris, George takes his life the night before in their Parisian Hotel, dying in humiliating and tormenting circumstances, he was found dead on the toilet.
The story is tragic, the camera work offers insights into Bacon's sense of distatse and disgust as motivating factors in his art, some scenes look incredibly like one of his tormented "screaming", portraits.
Jacobi is superb is as Bacon and Craig is both engaigingly sweet and by equal measure, distastefully tormented as Dyer. Other highlights include the exact set replica of Bacon's dismal studio flat and Tilda Swinton as the grubbily horrid "Mother", Lesbian Matriarch of the seedy Gay club which provides the hot bed for both creative and destructive forces to which Bacon and his contemparies are drawn, throughout the film.

I couldn't believe how much Derek Jacobi actually resembled Francis Bacon, in addition to emulating his high camp mannerisms. This impression of Bacon's relationship in the 1960s with petty criminal George Dyer has been widely panned in the UK but it must be remembered that John Maybury created the film with no cooperation from the Bacon estate, which is why none of Bacon's paintings even figure in the movie (quick quiz: which cult movie of the 60s opens with two canvasses by Bacon? see below for answer).

Still, the recreation of Bacon's milieu in 60s Soho is passable, dear, despite the filtering out of the more offensive conversational profanity which was a daily aspect of life and communication amongst the artists, proprietors, dilletantes, drunks and hangers on who formed Bacon's inner circle, or who hung out in the glorified front room of the Colony Room club or the Coach and Horses.

As Bacon would say: "Champagne for my real friends, and real pain for my sham friends".

(Answer: 'Last Tango in Paris')

Francis Bacon was a famous English Painter born in Ireland to English parents. He was born on October 28th, 1909 and died on April 28th, 1992.

Francis Bacon is the center piece of this movie which tells a section of his life from when he met George Dyer (played hauntingly and sexually by 007's Daniel Craig) till right after we learn the news of George's untimely death.

This movie is quite well filmed and very artsy giving us an inside view of Francis Bacon and the monsters that drove him and tormented him. This movie also shows how Francis influenced George by showing him off, baiting him to be aggressive towards Francis sexually and eventually giving George enough money to buy all the booze and drugs George wanted. George's guilt over being used, even if it was a sort of love, came out in horrible dreams that tormented George till he basically drank his life away.

My lover and I felt the movie was very engrossing although it was very hard to watch and know this happened. The great scene of the movie is seeing Daniel Craig naked in the bathtub showing everything one would want to see. We would recommend this movie as the study of a man as an artist but more of a tormented soul who brings someone under his wing only to help destroy him.

~Cornelius

"LOVE IS THE DEVIL" is a study in the life of gay English painter Francis Bacon. It chronicles his life with his lover and model George Dyer. This film is as close cinematically to a Beacon painting as one could get. Jarring, disjointed, jagged and thrillingly repulsive. It demands an intelligent, and equally hip audience willing to invest in a story of great depth, pain and love. It isn't easy but it is so well worth the time it takes to enthrall.
Derek Jacoby is so engrossing as the raging queen of the art world of London in the 1960's. Bitter, biting and a bastard of epic proportions he manages a huge ego that is so layered in fortification that not many can see the wounded soft core to this man. For a while George, the big butch hunky crook who comes crashing into Francis' life, seems to penetrate to the heart of Bacon. But the psychology of this tortured artist defies love and denies what salvation might be found in the arms of the truly needy George. A great performance by one of the best actors around this is one of Jacoby's most brilliant portraits.
Then there is Daniel Craig as George. He so embraces this role as to disappear into the man so thoroughly that I forgot I was watching Daniel Craig. His George is a case of great packaging that hides a rotting lost soul bound for self-destruction as a validation of being told all his life he is worthless. This is yet another of Craig's moving, fearless performances that have made him the top star and great actor that he is today.

This film is challenging, demanding and draining, in other words a rewarding cinematic experience.

John Maybury's study of the love affair between the great Irish painter Francis Bacon (Derek Jacobi) and George Dyer (Daniel Craig), the handsome their twenty years Bacon's younger, is more of the kind of film you can really admire than enjoy: it's a dark and very sour study of their sadistic-masochistic relationship between the years 1964, when Dyer tumbled through Bacon's skylight seeking to burgle his house, and 1971 when Dyer committed suicide in France from an overdose of pills. Maybury achieves some lovely effects by framing their relationships entirely with the seediest filthiest milieux imaginable and often using interesting distorting camera tricks (such as shooting characters through curved glass whiskey bottles or wineglasses, or using angled mirrors) to reproduce the famous ugly distorting effects of Bacon's paintings. Maybury was forbidden from using any of Bacon's actual work for the film, so if you didn't know what the finished works looked like you'd be very confused; still, it's hard to imagine anyone seeing this who doesn't have some familiarity with Bacon's work. Even so, some of the more cheaper shots (like those of Craig as Dyer threatening to jump off the ledge of a high New York City hotel) were so clearly done on the cheap they mar the overall effect of the film.

In their sexual encounters Bacon, a lifelong masochist, made Dyer the physically dominant and punishing figure (the film does not shy away from suggesting the more disturbing elements of their sexplay, which includes Dyer extinguishing cigarettes on Bacon's body at Bacon's request). But out of the bed the sour, cynical, and often intentionally cruel Bacon dominated the fastidious and unhappy Dyer, who despite his beauty felt he was a nothing, even when he was the famous model and partner of arguably the most famous living painter in the English-speaking world. Both actors really show their range with their roles, and Jacobi looks so much like the actual Francis Bacon, and adapts so beautifully to his poisonous nasty remarks that it's almost uncanny. It's fascinating to compare his performance with Craig's equally fine one: whereas Jacobi's long stage training shows in his more theatrical flourishes, Craig, who is predominantly a stage actor, goes for subtler effects, suggesting Dyer's misery, self-hatred, and complete lack of confidence. Maybury's fascination with the men's shared misery together prevents him from showing anything of Bacon's lingering years of agonizing guilt after Dyer's suicide that prompted him to create his masterwork, a triptych reproducing Craig's suicide. As a result, you feel only relief when Dyer dies and feel both men are better off without one another since Dyer seems only to be holding Bacon back and Bacon takes such relish in verbally tormenting his partner. So the whole film leaves you with the mistaken impression that Dyer didn't mean all that much to Bacon.

This black portrait of the artist Francis Bacon and his rough-trade boyfriend, George Dyer, amounts to nothing more than a bleak look at an excessively immature relationship. The film never dips below the shallow surface of their tortured lives, its focus almost always shocking and never tender.

Not knowing much about the life or art of Francis Bacon, before viewing the film I read as much about him as I could, having been forewarned that many people find the film as difficult to understand as the twisted relationship between the two people it portrays. From what I discovered of Bacon's life, the film is possibly quite accurate, at least as far as his relationship with Dyer is concerned. The problem is that real life is often not very pretty, and if a film of such unseemly lives is to succeed, it would help to offer some deeper understanding of the characters it presents, or at least proffer some hint of the artistic output of a man who, if the critics and biographers are correct, was one of the most important artists of the 20th century. Instead, Love is the Devil never reaches beyond a stark presentation of the cruel, selfish indifference of the lead character (Bacon) and the hopeless frustration of the tragic life of George Dyer. Bacon as an important artist is never explored at all, which could have served to at least balance the harshness of his more unflattering reality.

For the life of me, I can't figure out why, if their film portrayals are to be believed, so many well-known artists seem to drench themselves in squalor and dysfunction. In some respects, the story of Bacon and Dyer (as presented in this film) reminded me of the twisted love affair between Joe Orton and Kenneth Halliwell in the drama, Prick Up Your Ears, which starred Gary Oldman and Alfred Molina. Orton was a hugely successful playwright and Bacon a highly successful artist, and according to their respective cinematic renderings, both lived tortured lives of romantic dysfunction, paired with partners who were far beneath their intellect and talent. But aside from the further coincidence of both stories being set in England in the 1960's, there the similarity ends. Orton and Halliwell were writers, one supremely talented and the other inept, but at least they were intellectually compatible, if not professional equals. Bacon and Dyer had nothing in common beyond a self-destructive love of alcohol and a penchant for inflicting pain on each other and others around them, which appears to be the sole point of Love is the Devil.

From the very start, Dyer is clearly in over his head. His love for Bacon is fed by his awe of a talent that his mind is unable to grasp, and the frustration of having nothing to offer beyond his physical beauty. Bacon can provide only cruelty and bitchiness. The relationship is doomed from the beginning, and Bacon is portrayed as an enigmatic combination of physical masochist and intellectual sadist, with nary a hint of his awesome artistic ability. Although expertly etched by the acting of Derek Jacobi and Daniel Craig, and both actors do provide their share of brilliance, the film suffers from a limited depiction that emphasizes Bacon's cruelty and Dyer's despair. If this is an accurate portrayal of their rather sordid love lives, it would have been better for Bacon's reputation and Dyer's memory to have simply left them alone. No matter how much Bacon can be defended as a tortured genius, it is Dyer who emerges as the sole sympathetic figure in the piece, drowning his ineffectual stabs at romantic fulfillment in an ever-downward spiral of booze, drugs and rent boys.

Part of the message of this film seems to be, "Avoid falling in love with genius". If a film is to provide such a hopelessly depressing narrative of immaturity, selfishness and alcoholism, it would behoove the film's creators to at least balance these images with some of its subject's accomplishments. What emerges is not a very flattering picture of artistic genius or gay romance, and in the end, I decided if a film can only portray the seedy aspects of a great artist's private life, maybe it shouldn't present it at all. I give it five stars for the well nuanced acting, and minus one for the story and direction.