Review - Love is the Devil

I'm a big fan of Francis Bacon's paintings. I've got them plastered all over my room which, in effect, is creepy, and leads to unsettling dreams sometimes. While he eschewed his work as that of "horror", insisting it was merely the way he saw things and while some may find the images horrific he found them beautiful, I think he also understood that to the outside observer, his work was horror, of the weakness of the flesh, and how easily violated we can be.

Love is the Devil (Study for a Portrait of Francis Bacon) apparently didn't have the rights to show any of Bacon's work, but gets around that in a great way - the director shot the entire film as if every frame were a Bacon painting, and it's terrific to behold. The blacks and reds of the film are dark and overwhelming - its as if the entire film were shot through intestinal lining. Which, I imagine, would make Bacon a very happy man.

Derek Jacobi and Daniel Craig are great as Bacon and George Dyer, with whom Bacon had a long-suffering relationship with. There's a great moment in the film where Bacon's discussing his paintings of Dyer with a friend who says that the paintings are love poems and that Bacon puts far more effort into expressing his love through the paintings than he puts into his relationship with Dyer, and if the film is telling the truth than yes, I'd very much agree with that. Bacon is cold, sarcastic, and endlessly grim, without any patience for Dyer's obviously fragile mental state. Though Jacobi infuses Bacon with an evident affection for Dyer, he can regrettably never seem to get that out of his mouth before a snide comment does rolls out first.

All that said, the film is tough going. The Bacon-esque visuals piled on top of the sneering pessimism of Bacon's outlook and life add up to a bit of a downer, to put it mildly. True, very much so, to Bacon, but unless you're a fan of his work I can't see most people wanting to sit through the film. A world where everyone is ugly and brutal, and love is a contest to see which one of you will kill the other first.