Directed by John Maybury, 1998, 87 minutes

When small-time thief George Dyer (Daniel Craig) breaks into Francis Bacon’s (Derek Jacobi) Soho flat he finds himself in a long-term relationship with the artist. Dyer inspires Bacon to new levels of creativity but his fragile sense of self struggles to survive in Bacon’s complex bohemian world.

John Maybury’s intense and layered study of Francis Bacon is a marvel of low-budget creativity. The filmmakers were initially unable to obtain permission from the artist’s estate to show Bacon’s paintings directly. Denied access to the usual cinematic short-cuts of art biography until production was almost complete, they were instead obliged to deploy an ingenious array of creative photographic techniques to re-create Bacon’s visual language. Shots are reflected, distorted by removing the camera lens or split and fragmented by cracked glass. This crafted, low-tech approach suits the film beautifully and matches Bacon’s brutally immersive approach to artistic creation.

Bacon’s work is intensely somatic. Frustrated by the flesh, he wants to turn his subjects inside out to find out how they work. He concentrates almost entirely on the human figure which he manipulates as if it were clay; warping and slicing flesh, muscle and bone to uncover the inner character of his subjects. Like the experimental photographic studies of Edweard Muybridge he catches faces blurred by motion, in the act of speaking or forming an expression, flesh is mobile, rarely still. Bacon’s plastic creatures may appear menacing or pitiful, but they also seem to possess a distinct inner life. Bacon admired Goya’s work and shares his interest in honest, direct portraiture. Although distorted, character is recognisable in fragments, the angle of a brow or the line of a jaw that capture the personality. Confinement also plays an important role in Bacon’s work. His subjects are often trapped in tight, bounded space (like boxing rings or menagerie cages). Bacon often presents his figures in the form of the triptych and this image repeats throughout the film in a variety of forms and variations.

‘Love is the Devil’ showcases career-best performances from both Derek Jacobi and Daniel Craig. Jacobi’s portrayal of Bacon is uncannily accurate. He captures Bacon at work, attacking the canvas like a boxer or transported by ecstasy as he watches Eisenstein’s ‘Battleship Potemkin’. Much of Bacon’s self- image is, itself a construction and we see the artist painstakingly creating his own public face with powder, boot-polish and bleach before he goes out on the town.  Craig uses the same sense of tough vulnerability that revived the James Bond franchise to express Dyer’s fractured emotional life. Dyer literally falls into Bacon’s world at the start of the film, landing in a drift of photographs and illustrations (including one of himself) that Bacon uses as reference material for his work. George is caught between his past life on the fringes of London’s gangster culture, and the self-obsessed, toxic avant-garde of the Colony Room Club. These two closed worlds exist in proximity and occasionally intersect but George is too much of an innocent to move comfortably between them. Isolated from his former friends and unable to connect with Bacon’s social circle he serves only as part of the artist’s source material, trapped between spaces like one of the figures in Bacon’s art and unable to fit into either world.

Bacon’s coterie, the eccentrics of the Colony Room Club are rendered in hideous detail. Perverse photographer John Deakin (Karl Johnson) and Bacon’s chronicler, the art-critic Daniel Farson, who also served as advisor to the film, (played here by Adrian Scarborough). Isabel Rawsthorne (Anne Lambton) provides a rare touch of humanity as she constantly goads Bacon’s conscience. Holding sway over this ‘concentration of camp’ is the redoubtable Muriel Belcher (or ‘Mother’) recreated by an unrecognisable Tilda Swinton.  Maybury called in favours and used creative casting to populate the film with many of Bacon’s former acquaintances, members of the Club and figures from the art world. Many of the background cast are connected to the artist in some way and this adds the film’s authentic feel. Look out for very brief cameos from Tracy Emin, Gary Hume and many others.

Maybury struggles to avoid cliché in depicting Bacon and Dyer’s relationship which lasted from 1963 to 1971. Although Bacon likes George to be the dominant sexual partner George is unable to function in the real world where Bacon has financial and emotional control. Bacon needs the regular release and catharsis of casual sex; George requires an emotional dimension to sexual relationships that Bacon is unable to supply. George’s discomfort with his homosexuality is dramatized by his obsessive hand-scrubbing, he inhabits a more ambivalent world which blurs homo-erotic and homo-social behaviours, the world of the Turkish bath and the Kray twins. George may be an angelic thug very much to Bacon’s sexual tastes, but the artist is discomforted by displays of emotional neediness. Bacon’s cruelty stems from impatience with sentiment and his obsession with the physical. He describes even heartfelt declarations of love as slogans ‘learned from the television’. Bacon’s offhand cruelty begins as a pose, but he is gradually worn down by George’s dependence to the edge of resentment. Although there is emotional violence there are also images of poignant tenderness between George and Francis as they share a gentler, domestic existence in private. The film is cast as a study of the artist’s sense of loss, intercut throughout are images of Bacon remembering his petty cruelties with painful regret.  His love can only find expression in his work, culminating in the extraordinary ‘Triptych May-June 1973’ a startling and forthright statement of grief. Echoes of this work have recurred throughout the film as premonitory dream-images foreshadowing events to come.

Although there are many Bacon biographies little is written about George who seems destined to remain the troubled muse, a cypher trapped in paint or photographic chemicals rather than a complete individual. The details of their relationship remain private and so we’ll probably never know whether Bacon was as cruel as he is portrayed here. The screenplay emphasises Bacon’s acidic wit to heighten dramatic effect, but Maybury pointedly avoids any references to Bacon’s more unpalatable political views which may have further alienated the viewer. The film may be a ‘study’ but the cinematic portrait remains incomplete. The interested viewer can learn more from a range of critical biographies that have analysed Bacon in closer detail.

Even if you don’t usually use commentaries, it’s well worth listening to Derek Jacobi and John Maybury’s track on the 2008 BFI DVD. Their memories of the film are insightful but also, at times very funny. There is much significant detail in the film and the commentary reveals how much care and consideration that went into its production. ‘Love is the Devil’ is an uncompromising study of an uncompromising artist; the viewer’s reaction to the film will be dictated by his or her response to Bacon’s work. Maybury’s film is unlikely to win many converts, but it probes deep into the viscera of Bacon’s artistic aesthetic.

Quotes

“The selfishness my work demands leaves no room for an emotional self. Can tenderness ultimately only manifest itself in the motion of a brush?”  Francis Bacon (Derek Jacobi)

Connections

Film

‘Performance’ directed by Don Cammell and Nicholas Roeg (1970)

‘The Krays’ directed by Peter Medak (1990)

‘Naked Lunch’ directed by David Cronenberg (1991)

‘Goya in Bordeaux’ directed by Carlos Saura (1999)

‘Pollock’ directed by Ed Harris (2000)

‘Frida’ directed by Julie Taymor (2002)

‘Bacon’s Arena’ directed by Adam Lowe (2006)

Reading

Daniel Farson, The Gilded Gutter Life of Francis Bacon, Vintage, 1994

David Sylvester, Looking back at Francis Bacon, Thames and Hudson, 2000

Music

Ryuichi Sakamoto, ‘Love is the Devil’, Asphodel, 1998