Love Is the Devil

Toronto International Film Festival Program Guide
1998

Love Is the Devil
John Maybury
UNITED KINGDOM, 1998
91 minutes Colour/35mm
Production Company: BFI Production/ Premiére Heure/Partners in Crime
Executive Producer: Frances-Anne Solomon, Ben Gibson
Producer: Chiara Menage
Screenplay: John Maybury
Cinematographer: John Mathieson
Editor: Daniel Goddard
Production Designer: Alan MacDonald
Sound: Paul Davies
Music: Ryuichi Sakamoto
Principal Cast: Sir Derek Jacobi, Daniel Craig, Tilda Swinton, Adrian Scarborough, Anne Lambton, Annabel Brooks, Karl Johnson
Production: BFI Production

Perhaps John Maybury’s greatest achievement in Love Is the Devil is not the astonishingly original visual look of the film—transforming Francis Bacon’s unique approach to light and figure into something wholly cinematic—but his ability to forge a transcendent love story out of the ruinous lives he has chosen to portray. At any rate, it is an extraordinary accomplishment, richly textured in every way and featuring the finest screen performance of Sir Derek Jacobi’s extremely distinguished career.

The film begins in 1971 at the Grand Palais in Paris. Bacon (Jacobi), welcomed as the world’s “greatest living painter,” inaugurates a retrospective of his work while his model and lover of seven years, George Dyer (Daniel Craig), downs enough pills and alcohol in their Paris hotel room to fell a horse.

As he slips into unconsciousness, Dyer recalls the day when they “met.” He was a cat burglar and a petty East End London thief who literally fell into Bacon’s life through the skylight. Their unconventional relationship developed quickly on the painter’s terms: Bacon was a masochist in bed and a sadist outside of it. Dyer became a model for some of Bacon’s most celebrated and disturbing paintings, but found it difficult to penetrate his sophisticated demi-monde of dandyish artists, low-rent rent boys and amusing drunks, all of whom gathered at the legendary Colony Room. As Bacon’s stature grew, Dyer sank into a delusional morass of drugs and alcohol, every day becoming more pathetic and helpless.

Each moment of this tragic story is seen through an arresting image. Most radically, the extraordinary Tilda Swinton, as a massive dowager hag lording over the Colony, is shot entirely in reflections off liquor bottles, distorting her in a way that would make Bacon proud. Details such as this make Love Is the Devil eerily synchronistic; it is as though Bacon’s aesthetic augurs the course of his life.

All the performances are wonderful in the film—especially considering the dense edifice of theory, history and cinematographical representation with which they compete—but Jacobi’s Bacon is something else entirely. Rarely has an actor invested so much in someone so horrible and made him so absolutely irresistible.
—Noah Cowan