LOVE IS THE DEVIL explores the tumultuous life and art of notorious British painter Francis Bacon.
Love Is the Devil: A Study for a Portrait of Francis Bacon is a disturbing film, but the dark tone is fitting. One of the film’s characters brands Bacon the "morbid poet of the world of evil," and indeed, not only could Bacon himself be an unsavory character, but his paintings, with their bloody violence, are much more harrowing than beautiful. In his loose depiction of one period of Bacon’s life, director John Maybury, who is best known for an array of stylish music videos as well as the remarkable "electronic film" Remembrance of Things Fast, opted to forego the high-tech gadgetry he has used in the past. Instead, he mined cinematic history for basic camera tricks and the most rudimentary filmmaking methods to render a portrait whose brute ugliness perfectly underscores both the horror and beauty of Bacon’s work.
Born in Dublin to British parents, Bacon began his artistry in the late Twenties. By the Forties, with paintings such as Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion, a 1944 triptych featuring odd, grotesquely shaped creatures, he had become notorious for a bold and brutal figurative style. In 1964, George Dyer attempted to break into Bacon’s house, but the burglary was thwarted when he fell through the artist’s studio skylight; Dyer did meet Bacon, however, and a relationship ensued. Bacon eventually painted a series of Dyer portraits, and it was these canvasses in particular which intrigued Maybury. Rather than making a traditional biographical film of Bacon’s life, Maybury chose to focus on the seven-year relationship between the two men, and its tragic end.
"There isn’t any real need for a documentary biopic on Francis Bacon," Maybury contends. "Many already exist. Similarly, there are biographies and monographs with great essays by brilliant writers, so the information is all there. What interested me, and the reason I honed in on this period, is that the portraits of George Dyer are my favorite paintings, and the [other canvasses] made during that period are among my favorites from Bacon’s body of work. Beyond that, there is the subject of the artist and his muse. [That theme] is as old as the hills, but in this particular instance there is an interesting dynamic in the sexual relationship that’s evident in the paintings."
Maybury’s lead actors Derek Jacobi as Bacon and Daniel Craig as George Dyer both bear a striking resemblance to their real-life counterparts, and both give excellent performances, capturing the nuances of the power which is traded back and forth in the relationship. The film also stars Tilda Swinton, Anne Lambton, Adrian Scarborough, Karl Johnson, and Annabel Brooks as various figures from Bacon’s life.
The film begins as Bacon returns home to London from the triumphant 1971 opening of a major show at the Galeries Nationales du Grand Palais in Paris. When the artist arrives, he slips his key into a lock in a close-up image drawn from Bacon’s 1971 painting Triptych, whose center panel presents a figure resembling Dyer turning a key in similar fashion. From here, Maybury, who references many of Bacon’s paintings throughout the film, patterns the story almost in reverse; indeed, a voice-over mentions the "shards of memory" that are left, and the ensuing narrative is like a bomb exploding in reverse. The audience is transported back to the beginning of the relationship, and watches as Dyer disintegrates, falling victim to the nightmarish world Bacon renders in oils, but which his favorite model endures in the flesh.
For Maybury, whose previous work is experimental, having a properly structured narrative was a new experience. He began writing the screenplay by doing extensive research on Bacon, and based much of the story on Daniel Farson’s biography The Gilded Gutter Life of Francis Bacon. An early draft of his script was 200 pages long, prompting the BBC, which was involved with the project, to provide Maybury with an editor, Miriam Segal. "It was her thankless task to help me impose some sort of order on that early draft," opines Maybury. Segal’s approach was far more traditional in terms of structure, and Maybury found himself intrigued by the strictures of conventional storytelling. "It was extremely interesting to work with her and to discuss what the conventional approach would be," he says. "It gave me a starting point from which to develop the ideas. But early on, after I’d decided to do the project, I knew that I would have to make an attempt to move toward conventional cinema."
While Maybury may describe the story’s shape as conventional, the picture’s visual style is anything but. Maybury, cinematographer John Mathieson, and production designer Alan Macdonald spent a great deal of time working out the look they wanted to achieve, and the trio storyboarded the entire film.
Macdonald has designed all of Maybury’s films to date, and the director met Mathieson some 15 years ago, while both were working in various capacities on projects by the late avant-garde filmmaker Derek Jarman (whose 1986 picture Caravaggio offers compositions inspired by the Renaissance painter’s work, photographed by cinematographer Gabriel Beristain, BSC). For Maybury, there were certain restrictions which had to be addressed before he even began to consider the project. "First and foremost, there were two criteria that dictated certain approaches," offers the cameraman. "Number one was the very low budget, which immediately suggested to me that a more unorthodox approach was going to be necessary to take the budget to the places we needed to go. The other obvious thing was that it’s a film about a visual artist. In making a film about such an artist, your first responsibility is to make a really visual film. To me, the failure of a lot of films that are made about visual artists is that they tend to concentrate on the extravagances and excesses of the characters, often at the expense of the images depicting the work." Maybury countered this pitfall by looking to the paintings themselves. "The paintings are almost telling you what to do," he says. "They present this very claustrophobic, modernish environment quite clean and quite cold in a sense, but there’s also this frenzy and energy within the figures."
[ continued on page 2 ]