Like Prick Up Your Ears, this is a biopic of a famous artist that’s actually about his little-known boyfriend. In both films, the untalented partners of genius are both maid and whore for their lover, but in the end, swallow the union with their own far more complex psyches. Their real lives are the synergy of everything their partners try to capture artistically and in the final analysis, it’s a little difficult to work out just who was the creator, and who was the muse.

Love Is The Devil is a dark and fine portrait of two tortured souls. One’s alcoholic, pill popping and talented, the other’s alcoholic, pill popping and suicidal. It’s hard to concentrate on Derek Jacobi’s Francis Bacon, even though it’s a brilliant performance and even though he gets the best lines in the film, such as “Champagne for my real friends, real pain for my sham friends”. Beat that. Anyway, Daniel Craig is as least as good an actor as Derek Jacobi, and as George Dyer, he creates a gay film character for the times.

Dyer is the petty crim who crashes through the roof of Bacon’s place while he’s trying to break in. Apparently always up for an adventure, Bacon greets his intruder with an invitation to come to bed. They’re inseparable from then on, Bacon becoming increasingly rich and famous, Dyer spiralling into inadequacy and addiction. In the bedroom, Dyer rules over the masochistic Bacon with cigarette butts and his cock, but socially, Bacon flips like a pancake, lording it over all and sundry and leaving Dyer to drink himself to tears with rent boys and whoever else will listen. Much like Fox Biberkopf, Dyer doesn’t really know what to do in his hoity-toity boyfriend’s milieu, and ends up playing the loser because it’s the only available role. He doesn’t know where he is, and doesn’t know why he’s there, and the freedom of his lover’s bank account gives him plenty of time to, well, drink.

John Maybury has used Bacon’s art as inspiration for the nightmarish look of the film, and in some scenes, has copied directly from certain triptychs and paintings to construct amazing looks that are a step away from the art gallery. Bacon’s take on Dyer’s suicide is recreated almost exactly here, and the numerous dream sequences involving human figures roasting on spits are straight from the artist’s canvas. It’s clever styling, because it looks great, and also because it lends credence to the idea that the film is Bacon’s view of his life and main relationship.



Upsetting this idea is Craig, whose performance is so disturbing, so amazing, that we don’t think of Bacon for much of the film at all. All Bacon becomes is the crucifix on which Dyer, moth-like, impales himself.

Sodden with alcohol and tripped out on pills, this film is a perfect capture of singing sixties London, and the gay bar scenes, featuring an unrecognisable Tilda Swinton, are fascinating. It’s also a superb gay/artist film, in that it couldn’t be more different to the usual struggling psycho and his long-suffering muse that we’re used to in films like Pollock and The Hours (why is it always Ed Harris?). Here, we have a brutal and pessimistic film that mixes tribute with damnation - just as Bacon would have liked.

Related Reading
Prick Up Your Ears

Review by Mark Adnum