Love Is the Devil: Study for a Portrait of Francis Bacon (1998) watch online HD

John Maybury's film presents artist Francis Bacon as an uncaring, disturbed, unhinged, genius who used people and life to feed his bizarre artistic talent. Even the way the film is shot (distorted images, odd angles, flashes of colour) shouts 'artist'. Against this backdrop the story of Bacon's life is secondary.

Derek Jacobi plays Bacon, in a radical departure from the work he is best known for - in fact, this film was completed while he was regularly on television as brother Cadfael. He is excellent in a deeply unsympathetic role. Daniel Craig, as his lover, nemesis, and muse, is also very good. Tilda Swinton is the best of a supporting cast of oddball characters.

This film is ultimately frustrating, difficult, and perhaps a pointless exercise as far as giving us any lasting impression of Bacon's character. But, like his well-known paintings, it is snatches of images you will remember.

Love is the Devil is amazingly rich in character and visuals. Just like Bacon's paintings, it is abstract, provocative, dark, and cruel, yet intensely mesmorizing. Maybury couldn't have picked a better actor than Derek Jacobi to portray the very disturbed Bacon. Jacobi is so good, I wondered whether this was just acting or the real thing. One of my favorite scene was Bacon grooming himself, using ammonia cleanser to brush his teeth and curling his eyelashes with his saliva. Neither could I ever forget the countless enigmatic facial expressions Jacobi delivers. One of the best films I've seen in years.

"Love Is The Devil" stirs me to scope out James Bond now, Daniel Craig's an exciting choice I must say: content over celebrity.

In response to the viewer who complained about the dislocated scenes that may or may not be relevant to the whole, the distorted lens... this is a film about a real painter. What is so brilliant about this work, is that they found a way to visually bring Bacon's paintings to life - they are exploring the man, the life, the love through the filter of his own paintings. Audacious attempt. Expertly Accomplished. One of the few films about painting that honestly pays true homage to the art form. This is not a suburban film about a painter - and who he was and what happened to him and what he did - rather... This Is A Painter's Film. There are graceful, indelible moments here that have scraped a little unused previously untouched part of my brain I did not know was there and scarred and these irrelevant vivid images, these haunting shots that only exist to soar and be seen without a net of linear context have affixed themselves into my memory to reappear at whim and always make me gasp. and clamor to savor, they slip away again. and the world, oh yea, here. That last amazing scene I'm trying so hard not to copy in my own creations, but - that - last - amazing - scene - seems - stronger - than - my - own - will -

'Love is the Devil' captures one crucial decade in the life of the English painter, Francis Bacon, considered by many, for the half century after World War II, the world's greatest living painter. This decade, the 1960s, is reflected through Bacon's relationship with a young hood, George Dyer, whom he first encounters ineptly breaking into his studio, and whom he immediately sleeps with. A depressive suffering constant nightmares, Dyer is wined and dined by the artist, initiated into his bitchily hostile coterie of friends, and gradually neglected as Bacon concentrates on his work. Many of the astonishing paintings from this period evince a great understanding and love of their principle subject, Dyer, and one friend notices that Bacon puts more effort into representing his love on paint than into the relationship itself. Dyer becomes increasingly suicidal.

Bacon has one of the most distinctive oeuvres in the history of art. Although he absorbed many influences, most obviously Picasso and the Surrealists, a Bacon painting is immediately recognisable. For fifty years, his style barely changed, as he concentrated, compressed and developed a recurring set of obsessive motifs - mangled bodies and distorted, often indistinguishable heads and faces, mouths screaming, against restrained, geometric backgrounds, an ordinary English room, a ritual theatre or circus space etc; an alternation between lurid, violent colours and muted, banal ones; props, such as light bulbs, lavatories, mirrors, meat, especially meat. He was very interested in the fragmentation of the image, the disjunction between subject and reflection, for example, or subject and shadow.

Maybury, also an artist, tries to shoot his narrative in the style of Bacon - the film's subtitle, echoing the artist's own non-emotional, mock-technical practice, is 'Study for a Portrait of Francis Bacon'. All the motifs are here - the narrative opens with a hand putting a key in a lock as if the film will provide the key to the enigma of Bacon's life. There are many triple-mirror shots of Bacon, alluding to his favourite form, the triptych. Camera effects try to recreate the state of physical distortion, stretching, blurring, splitting, that characterises Bacon's figures. Dyer's first appearance, falling through a skylight into Bacon's studio, is transformed into one of Bacon's despairing fantasies, Dyer suspended in the dark, falling through a lot more than a roof. Specific paintings are recreated, most successfully in the sex scenes, with their violent, combatorial, yet private and intimate rituals. The bar scenes with Bacon's ghastly friends are a grotesque freakshow.

Whether or not this method works - and I don't think it does: film and painting are mutually exclusive media, the transfer from one to the other is often bathetic - Maybury must eventually settle into a narrative if he wants to keep any kind of an audience. Unfortunately, the need to tell stories was precisely the shackle Bacon wanted to cast off. And so there isn't really a narrative, there is no sense of progress in the central characters' relationship, except that Dyer begins it alive and ends it dead. There is no attempt to give the flavour of their life together. The film only really works if you are familiar with Bacon's work. You can spot the allusions and reworkings. But this doesn't lead to any greater understanding of the work, beyond a hackneyed life-informs-the-art model, one Bacon himself strenuously denied.

This solipsism is thoroughly in keeping with Bacon's art. The film is full of his wisdom, narrated by Jacobi, undigestible when just rattled off. As I have suggested the world is made over completely in his sensibility, even the scenes from which he is absent. This sense of claustrophobic privacy is a major effect of the art - there is little difference between the works of the 1940s and 80s, except perhaps for greater technical skill. Maybury misses an opportunity to put history back into Bacon's ahistorical oeuvre, to rescue him from vague expressions of horror and despair. You would have no idea the film was set in the 1960s, no idea about the major social changes of the time, or even the changes in art appreciation (although the film is mercifully free from homosexual-guilt/fear angst). If you have read a biography of Bacon, as I recently have, much of the film will seem jarring in the way watching 'Casablanca' or reading 'Hamlet' is, anecdotes rendered verbatim, adding to the film's unreal, unhelpful atmosphere.

The idea of falling is important in this story.George Dyer(play with perfection by Dani Greig)thought that he would be saved by Bacon but the painter only changed Dyer's physical falling into another more interior and destructive.We can see in different scenes(and forms) "The falling" ,to the long fall of Dyer during the title sequence until his own intention to jump from a flatroof and later through nightmarish like image who also got to do with a fall (to emptiness). Love is The devil shows how Bacon creates his paintings using Dyer(what a great name it sounds `Dying') as a MUSE and we can also see the bohemian circle of Bacon's drunk friends in which the painter is the nastiest(The great Tilda Swinton appears here as the owner of `Colony room' this place somewhere in SOHO)once again we are witness of DYER fall to alcohol ,drugs and an abusive relationship with Bacon who culminates,as everybody knows, in Dyer's suicide(his last fall at least).The most outstanding aspect of the film(besides this tormented love affair) is the photography and visual trick:the use of reflection is one of the main devices used by the director Maybury to allude to Bacon's paintings(there is a large roundmirror in the background that distorts the reflected image)Mirrors are used to repeat and layer images,resembling Bacon's use of the triptych.Water and shots through glasses and bottles distorts faces and forms(like Deneuve in Repulsion).I also loved the script,the philosophical approach(existencialism,)the wonderful actor Derek Jacobi, who plays Bacon has a perfect voice and the words he says sounds like aphorism.BUT besides S&M ,there's place to tenderness:the film opens with BACON grieving the death of his lover the scene is set in a bedroom BACON seats on the edge of the bed,his head buried in George pillow(where George laid his head suffering with nightmares)the scene is unique.

Dyer was a handsome man but he wasn't very sophisticated…If he would had read POE,he would knew the existence of diabolical painters who are capable to transcribe in to their works the vital substance of their models.If he would knew the story of Faust he would be able to identify the devil in the cherubin aging face of Bacon,who was then already a fallen angel in his own personal hell.This is a little great film I recommend it.

8/10

This movie is a portrait of British painter Francis Bacon (played by Derek Jacobi) in the 1960s. In the beginning of the movie, a young man named Dyer (Daniel Craig), intent on burglarizing Bacon's flat, has a misstep and falls into his art studio. Bacon approaches him and...asks him to come to bed with him! Dyer agrees and this is the beginning of their tumultuous romantic and complex sexual relationship.

This movie is really a focus on a relationship between people that are polar opposites. Bacon is a slightly mad artistic genius in his 50s, with snobby pretentious friends. Dyer is a naive 20 something working-class man who drinks too much. The only thing they have in common seems to be that Dyer's horrifying and bloody nightmares are very similar to Bacon's twisted paintings. As Bacon becomes more involved with his work and their differences become more pronounced, Dyer finds himself in a dark downward spiral. The scenes in this work like little vignettes. They are simultaneously visually stunning and repulsive--it is often like watching a painting that moves. The story is rather boring, but this movie is definitely worth seeing for its fantastic cinematography and frightening visuals. It looks like a nightmare come to life.

My Rating: 6/10.

Francis Bacon was one of the most acclaimed artists of his generation, and Derek Jacobi is one of the finest actors of his, but even this combination can't make 'Love is the Devil', John Maybury's biopic of Bacon's life, especially interesting. The problem is that the film lacks a central point of sympathy: Bacon comes across as selfish and spoilt, while his hapless lover (the film's other central character) is too clearly out of his depth from the start, and never manages to become someone in whom one can invest any hopes. In terms of its overall feel, the film tries to reflect Bacon's artistic sensibility; in this it is partially successful, although the odd decision to fade to black between practically every scene grows tiresome. Unless you're a particular fan of Bacon, you can afford to miss this film: Stephen Frears' 'Prick Up Your Ears' (a biopic of Joe Orton) explores similar themes with more humanity.

This film will insinuate itself into the images under your closed eyelids. Meat, blood, cuts, scars, wounds, assassinations, executions, dismemberments, car accidents, beatings, and burnings will all rush together in an explosion of pain, longing, and unsatisfied hungers. Homosexual sado-masochism, not gay love. The absolute evil of pure genius. A paint brush slashes the spirit as a razor, the body. The tormented torments; the masochist punishes the sadist. Flesh is set aflame with a cigarette, not a kiss. Francis Bacon is the one true artist of the postwar era. He understood that humanity had irrevocably crossed the barrier between reason and madness. This film casts us into the abyss of the collective unconscious where we may swim or be burned to a crisp. Hold your eyelids open with sharp orange toothpicks and suck on the bloody images. Watch the film five times and then seek out Bacon's work, at least in books, if not in museums. Perhaps then your unspoken thirst may be quenched and you will grasp the 20th Century before you plummet into the 21st.

This is a fearless, eerie film about the relationship between British painter Francis Bacon (Derek Jacobi) and his handsome, unsophisticated lover George Dyer (the new James Bond, Daniel Craig). The destructive affair is told from Bacon's and Dyer's perspectives with unsettling images strongly directed by John Maybury. Their story is somewhat like Joe Orton and Kenneth Halliwell's (told by Stephen Frears in "Prick Up Your Ears"), and the emotional bond between the intellectual artist and the rustic lover reminds me of Truman Capote and Perry Smith (coincidentally, Daniel Craig played Smith in "Infamous") - except that "Love is the Devil" is visceral, surreal and dark like Francis Bacon's world was, and Bennett Miller's acclaimed "Capote", a good, albeit overrated, film with a spectacular performance by Philip Seymour Hoffman, was more concerned about being elegant and palatable than being closer to the truth. Bacon and Capote were talented, troubled men, with huge ego issues, who were partly responsible for their respective lover's (Dyer)/ protégé's/victim? (Smith) ruin - and, later, for their own.

Had John Maybury been like Bennett Miller and turned Bacon's life into an 'elegant' flick, we'd have an Oscar contender here; thankfully he did not, and we got a brave little film that is hard to watch because it's such a visceral painting of an unsettling world. Jacobi and Craig are phenomenal, and the always fantastic Tilda Swinton has a small part as one of Bacon's friends. Well done, Mr. Maybury. 8/10.

When British painter Francis Bacon disturbs a burglar in his home, he invites George Dyer to come to bed with him in return for anything he wants to steal. This starts a relationship between the two that is as impatient and untrustworthy as it is passionate. Bacon draws on Dyer to compliment his work while at the same time Dyer begins to feel used and out of his depth in a relationship that draws him into the arty underworld of the time.

I don't know a great deal about Francis Bacon other than a passing knowledge of his work and I must admit that I had vague hopes that a film about the painter would give me a little more knowledge of him, his work or the circumstances around him; it's a shame then that it didn't really manage to do any of these things particularly well. Instead what it does is deliver a rather pretentious piece of film rather fails to really deliver anything of value for those of us who are not as smart and informed as others. Maybe of Bacon lovers (pardon the turn of phrase) this film serves as a minor insight into his life for them to um and ah over but for me it was simply a collection of blurry shots, overdone pretentious shots and arty sentiment.

The plot, for what it is, follows Bacon and Dyer together and separately as they destroy one another in various ways. It is as meaningful as watching paint dry because we are never allowed into these people as, well, people and the film seems more concerned with camera movement and minimalist sets. Of course part of this will appeal to the arty crowd as the direction tries to ape Bacon's style but I'm not sure if that was because his estate refused to have anything to do with the film or not. While not rubbish it is aimed at a select audience and I don't think I am in that group; a little annoying perhaps because I felt like the film was looking down its nose at me in the same way that Bacon did with Dyer but I suppose that's what I get for trying out something new!

What made it more worthwhile though was a collection of good performances throughout; none of them have particularly likable characters but they all deliver with passion. Certainly Jacobi is very good even if I came to dislike his Bacon's pretentious approach to life, art and others, but Jacobi never let up on his portrayal anyway. Craig is a good actor and he is like a hurt animal for most of the time here – eager to please but knowing he is out of his depth and suffering for it. Swinton is OK, Johnson is overdone and the rest of the support tend to just drift around like a collection of back street 'Darling!' clichés. However bleak and unlikeable performances from both Jacobi and Craig are worth seeing.

Overall this film was wasted on me as it seemed to be aimed at a very specific group of people who are much smarter than I. To me this was annoying as I felt inferior and irritated that the film did not throw me a bone to help me out with the subject. The direction, editing and themes come across as pretentious a bit too much and this did put me off but in fairness I'm not a big Bacon fan so maybe it was my fault. Anyway – fans of Bacon's work may wish to see this film to discuss his life further (whether they agree with the film or not) but for most of us this will come off as an elitist piece of cinema that does nothing to help the unaware and only serves to alienate 'the masses' from art.

This is a film about relationships, relationships which flow over and between Bacon's life and work. I come away from the film knowing much more than I ever knew and felt about Bacon and his work, and also the period in which he worked. I would liked to have seen much more of the famous (or should that be infamous) "Colony Room" where Bacon done his drinking and socialzing. Daniel Craig is spot on as the East End spiv and petite crook. Tilda Swinton plays the hilariously foul-mouthed Muriel Belcher and I am sure that Belcher would make make a good central character in another film. The film is not about Bacon's paintings, but the man himself. His relationships his world. London could never ever been as seedy as this but what a great place to search out life.

The film begins by perpetuating the myth of the first Bacon/Dyer meeting - Bacon catching Dyer in the act of robbing his studio - and thus immediately calls its authenticity into question. Whilst the myth has a certain cachet, the scene of discovery, as presented here, is as laughable as a cheesy gay porn scenario.

Daniel Craig is awesome as Bacon's piece of rough. Derek (Theatre Luvvy) Jacobi as Bacon camps it up by numbers. The arty camera devices cannot make up for the cheap production values or the threadbare script.

It's a depressing 80 mins. An everyday tale of two more self-hating homosexuals and a life of doom and gloom in 60s Soho. The only highlight being Mr Craig reclining in the bath. And, handsome as he is, it wasn't worth waiting 75 minutes for.

N.B. Since when did bouncers in 60s Britain wear earrings? And as for the bell-boy's mullet??? It's supposed to be a period piece! Couldn't they have got an actor with an appropriate hair cut???

Rarely seen English film from 1998 about which I can can only say I don't know much about art films, but I know what I like. This one is is set in a drab and austere not very swinging 1960s London where crook George Dyer (Daniel Craig) goes from burglary to buggery with artist Francis Bacon (a wonderful Derek Jacobi).

No real drama here, just consistently imaginative camera-work (blurred around the edges when the characters are getting drunk at the colony club), or the odd standout moment such as Bacon brushing his teeth with Vim (a white powdery bath cleaner). I like his line: "We all have nightmares, but they can't be as horrific as life". It's the sort of drama the late Derek Jarman used to make - only more watchable.

LOVE IS THE DEVIL: STUDY FOR A PORTRAIT OF FRANCIS BACON

Aspect ratio: 1.85:1

Sound format: Dolby Stereo

Anyone seeking specific information on the life and times of the artist Francis Bacon will find very little of value in this pointlessly obscure effort, which suggests everything and says nothing. As cold and loveless as its subject, John Maybury's film recounts Bacon's affair with the much younger George Dyer, a self-destructive petty criminal who didn't really belong in Bacon's world and was unable to cope with the repercussions. Dyer's influence on Bacon's work is mentioned only fleetingly, though their relationship - which moves from tranquility and contentment through to disillusionment and tragedy - forms the centrepiece of the narrative and is related through tiny scenes and fragments, punctuated by surreal images inspired by Bacon's paintings. The artist's estate refused permission for the filmmakers to represent his work on-screen, so the distorted close-ups, confined settings, and cheerless set designs conspire to 'imitate' the artist's style. Some kind of plot seems to emerge from the debris, but it's so bleak and depressing, you'll find yourself wondering why anyone thought Bacon's story was worth telling at all. If we'd wanted to meditate on the futility of a wasted life, most of us could have stayed at home and looked in the mirror...

Derek Jacobi is luminous, as always, as the artist in question, and the supporting cast render convincing portraits of the loathsome (and self-loathing) social circle in which he moved, while Daniel Craig is every bit their equal as the tormented Dyer. But despite these small nuggets of gold, the film is essentially worthless, an 'Art-house' product in the worst sense of the word. Spare yourself, and avoid like the plague.

Love is the Devil (1998)

Francis Bacon (along with Lucien Freud) is one of a handful of British painters of note in the last century. That's not very many. And he's inflated here beyond his very idiosyncratic and repetitive works. They're powerful paintings, no question, and filled with psychological drama as well as painterly angst. They come from a time when representative and expressive paintings was out of favor, and so he's a rebel, too.

But this isn't about Bacon the successful artist, and it doesn't address his work directly (the filmmakers couldn't get his cooperation so none of his work is shown). What it does do is show the man, as seen through actor Derek Jacobi, who plays a kind of deadpan and slightly boring character a little too well. We are, I think supposed to find the artist through his mentality, which is played out here by showing his social and sexual lives in all kinds of diversity.

But there is another goal to the movie, to me: creating an interesting contemporary world of artists and social renegades. That is, the art world of London (etc.) in roughly the 1970s or 80s. The filmmaker John Maybury is a close associate of Derek Jarman, who was an openly gay filmmaker known for personally quirky films that dealt with issues that mattered to him, including his odd and intriguing "Caravaggio." Maybury, unlike Jarman, has no history of great indie films, and this one is just structurally awkward, and in filmmaking terms it seems a little novice, whatever the good intentions.

So it might actually fail on several levels. One is the most damning--that it doesn't actually illuminate the paintings. I found the personal life and the heightened story distracting, even if it has a basis in truth (and is the driving line of the movie). It also doesn't quite work on the simple level of convincing acting, even though Jacobi looks enough like Bacon to make that fly, and his counterpart played by Daniel Craig is decent (we don't dare expect more from Craig, do we?). And then the movie wobbles visually, both with camera-work that is either clumsy or affected (or both) and with editing that seems clunky. That is, this is a movie almost "thrown together."

Which I'm sure it was not. Maybury is trying to mainstream his life (unlike Jarman, who enjoyed being an Indie star), and his collaborations with the likes of Keira Knightley are revealing for both (one as a way of going serious, the other for a way of going commercial).

I know there are those who accept and love a movie like this because of its flaws, which only enhance somehow it's integrity and its artistry. But that's only one way to look at it, and if you like offbeat movies that are also brilliant deep down, you might not find that here.

Taking a lemon and eating it whole: swirling the sour, acrid juice and pulp around in your mouth and savoring the burn; chewing the tough skin and reveling in the pure bitterness. That's the most fitting analogy I can think of for Francis Bacon's approach to both his life and his art, if you are to believe his story as John Maybury has chronicled it in the biopic LOVE IS THE DEVIL.

Having had only the most peripheral exposure to Bacon's work and knowing even less about the man's life, I have to admit that my interest in seeing the film was mostly prurient (after all, Daniel Craig IS naked in it), but it most definitely left me with a pressing need for sunshine and cute, fluffy bunnies after all was said and done.

Brilliant actor Derek Jacobi draws a razor-sharp portrait of a man whose penchant for self-loathing and the active contempt for everyone else in his life are the only reasons why he even bothers to get up in the morning; that and spending every other free moment trying to find the simple beauty behind life's darkest horrors and transferring it to canvas. Not the most pleasant character to spend ninety minutes of your life with, but a little research will inform you ahead of time that this movie will never be confused with "The Sound Of Music."

The opening sequence actually telegraphs the entire story: ne'er-do-well-burglar George Dyer (Craig) tumbles through a skylight into Bacon's studio, and rather than seeing flashes of objects ripe for the taking, George is treated to what appear to be glimpses into Hell - flashes of distorted bodies, streaks of blood-red, raw meat, faces and mouths distended in horror or agony. He's just seen some of the materials that Francis works with to create his 'art,' and he's barely had time to recover from the shock when he is confronted by the man himself, who beckons him with a proposition: come share his bed, and he can have anything he wants. And so begins their twisted, sadomasochistic relationship.

It's obvious that the roughly handsome George, with his street sensibility and working man's background, is in over his head with the monstrous and monstrously self-centered artist. But it becomes even more apparent when he falls in with George's scabrous, gargoyle-like friends as well, who come across as Algonquin "round-table" types who have even more pretensions and less of a pedigree than Mrs. Parker's storied associates.

Throughout the film, which does come across at times as pretentiously arty, it does seem a bit strange that none of Bacon's actual work ever makes an appearance. Considering the subject matter as it's presented, this might not be all that surprising. It would've been more of a shock if the filmmakers actually had obtained permission from Bacon's estate to use his work. After all, on the surface this could be perceived as nothing more than yet another tired tale of two degenerate, amoral, self-destructive gay men - just more fodder to be used as ammunition by fundamentalist-based homophobes; an example of how "they" live and what "they're" really like.

As has often been said, there's a fine line between madness and genius, and LOVE IS THE DEVIL blurs the lines completely, daring to propose that one cannot exist without the other. But the film is just as much about Dyer, the neophyte, and his own descent into insanity and despair, as he is gradually infected by Bacon's own black-hearted view of the world. Which is why this won't be everyone's cup of poison. Jacobi bravely plays Bacon with barely a single trace of sympathy, while it's equally hard to identify with Craig's Dyer, who seems doomed to oblivion from the start.

To sum it up, LOVE IS THE DEVIL seems to be geared more towards those art aficionados who already have a pretty well-informed grasp of Bacon's art and are more curious about his personal history, (with plenty of dramatic liberties taken, of course.) It may also be more attractive to viewers who are into watching character studies that feature great actors, of which this is definitely one. Now I'd like to see a documentary or even another biography that focuses more on Bacon's art and its impact on his peers and the art world in general, and less about the man and his tortured private life.

But not for a while, thank you very much.

This movie was very dark. Calling it a biography is going too far. It gave you a very small slice of Bacon's life, i.e., his affair with George. I am left with too many unanswered questions. Definitely an "art" film. Jacobi was great as he is in most all he does.

An astounding visualization of Francis Bacon's life and work. Enter Francis Bacon's world as his pictures are put on screen in a haunting, dream-like fashion that grips the viewer from beginning to end. Both Derk Jacobi and Daniel Craig are superb.

This film is a bit of a mixed bag really. It divided people in half-one praising it unreservedly whilst the other deriding it and complaining. Personally, I can understand both aspects but I side with the former group.

The whole film is like a surrealist painting but for me, the most unique scene from an artistic sense was the one in the pub, where Francis Bacon's circle of friends is introduced for the first time to the naive George Dyer. We see people's half-faces amidst a cloud of smoke and groggy reflections of featureless silhouettes on the grubby mirrored bar-front which, to me, was the perfect visual way in which to present the assortment of eccentric libertarians whom Francis Bacon counted among his nearest and dearest.

I've also read so many complaints about the alleged disjointed nature of the scenes, with the second half of the film being peppered with montages of nightmarish surrealist scenarios that George Dyer finds himself in. Well, weren't these scenes part of the character that was Dyer? His insecurities and fears were imbued into the very fabric of his relationship with Bacon and ultimately led to his demise. No disjointedness there. Someone mentioned that Tilda Swinton is almost unrecognisable in this film--unrecognisable yes but brilliant none-the- less.

The film on the whole is less about the two protagonists' lives and more about the nature of a relationship from the perspectives of the two people involved in it. Many found it shameful that Bacon's influence was not shown more or just that one small episode in his life merited a biographical film. But that's just it. This is not a biography. The title states: Love is the Devil: Study for a portrait of Francis Bacon. A portrait, not The portrait. This is an episode which speaks simply about a relationship and the universality of the two perspectives that defined it. The only point of objection I had at the end was the fact that very few people had even heard of the film which is easily one of Daniel Craig's best, not to mention Derek Jacobi.

A quite astonishingly pretentious piece of work. Exclusive and cliquey, it assumes a knowledge and/or understanding of Bacon's work, which to me - as a Bacon virgin - was entirely distracting and interruptive in the extreme. Overall; far too 'clever' for it's own good.

A most impressive first film. Derek Jacobi turns in a state of the art performance, as usual. Mayberry keeps the narrative quite thin, reserving his focus instead for the complexity of his characters and their interrelationships, making no apologies for its renderings of mostly unlikable people, especially Bacon himself. I was surprised to discover that George, Bacon's lover, is the true protagonist, and the story belongs as much to him as to Bacon. The cinematography is like an intriguing character in itself. Mayberry uses distorted images through wavy glass and warped mirrors to ingeniously paint his own real life version of Bacon's painting which were not allowed to be shown in the film by his estate.

This is a very interesting study about the work and disturbed personal life of one of the most important and revolutionary painters of contemporary art, but the film is incomplete without the presence of Lucien Freud, also a great painter, who was one of Bacon's closest friends and also one of his most used models.

I'll admit it. I rented this film to explore the past works of Daniel Craig. He's great in it and so is the legendary Derek Jacobi. The movie itself is presented in what I'm assuming is the same vein as Francis Bacon's works. There are lots of dramatic flashes of what are supposed to be disturbing imagery, etc. However, these effects take away from the story of what happened between these two people. Instead these two great actors are forced to tell a story as best they can in "moments". This movie did spur me to do some light research into Francis Bacon, which helped me fill in the story. Knowing more about what happened gave the performances more meaning but I think it could have been better. Still, full frontal nudity from Daniel Craig made it more than worth the price of admission. License to thrill: confirmed.

This film makes "Bent" seem cheerful.

It's hard to believe Francis Bacon could have been as hateful and negative as this. Worst was leaving his lover (for want of a better word) George Dyer out in the rain while a sadistic renter had his way with Bacon. Sorry, worst was his flippant remark when Andy Warhol (?) sympathised over Dyer's recent suicide.

The story, and apparently the life, lacked the redeeming wit of Joe Orton's, as told in "Prick Up Your Ears". Unlike his close counterpart Kenneth Halliwell, there was no suggestion that Dyer was Bacon's muse or had given him more than visual inspiration. I got to wish - at least in the film - that Dyer had taken to Bacon with a hammer before killing himself, as Halliwell did to Orton.

Yes, the film is fragmented and wild, like Bacon's paintings. But is that kind of imitation helpful to understand the painter? We got to see remarkably few actual Bacon paintings, and none of those for which he is famous.

Best line: "Champagne for my real friends. Real pain for my sham friends."

I have no idea how to relate to this film. It is filled with either ugly characters or sad victims. Everything is film via distorted lens and the show is presented in episodes which may or may not have anything to do with the whole.

It is a disturbing piece of work, not so much from the sex scenes but the underlying theme of an abusive relationship and the refusal to recognise and affirm a loved one. It was troubling seeing the protagonist push someone he may actually care about, to the edge with malevolent glee. What is even worse is the apparent lack of reason other than ennui, sadism and apathy. I don't like this film very much.