‘Love Is Devil’ Paints Morbid Picture of Francis Bacon

Sometimes it really is better to let a painter’s work speak for itself.

That’s the feeling that John Maybury’s adventurous but off-putting “Love Is the Devil” leaves you with. Cautiously subtitled “Study for a Portrait of Francis Bacon,” it concentrates on the painter’s relationship with his lover and model George Dyer, the inspiration for a series of key works in the Bacon canon.

You can sympathize with Maybury’s resistance to avoid the standard film biography approach to so unconventional a painter, widely heralded as one of the century’s greatest for his often grotesque yet riveting depictions of human suffering and solitariness. But Maybury carries the elliptical to the extent that we never get to see the “George” paintings in question. Yet the film is so morbid you have the need to experience the redemption of misery by art.

For all of Maybury’s barrage of arty-as-all-get-out flourishes, “Love Is the Devil” turns upon one of the movies’ oldest devices, the flashback. It’s 1971, and the 62-year-old Bacon (Derek Jacobi), at the Grand Palais in Paris, is being proclaimed the greatest living painter and the first British artist since Turner to be exhibited there. Meanwhile, back in Bacon’s hotel suite, Dyer (Daniel Craig), is deliberately quaffing a fatal dose of pills washed down by alcohol. From what Maybury depicts of the men’s relationship, which in fact lasted seven years, it is amazing he didn’t do himself in years earlier.

In any event, as Dyer loses consciousness he relives his terrible time with Bacon, some of it depicted through distorted lens to suggest his woozy state. Dyer, a striking-looking young working-class burglar, breaks into Bacon’s London residence, landing in a pile of photos, either of beautiful men such as himself or images of violence. Too bad he didn’t get the picture, so to speak. Instead of jail, Dyer winds up in Bacon’s bed.

Jacobi’s Bacon is a spiffy dresser, a trim but aging gay man who dyes his hair and uses makeup to hold on to an appearance of youth. In sex he’s a masochist who orders Dyer to beat him with a belt and even put out lighted cigarettes on his back. Since we repeatedly see the men sleeping, with Dyer clinging to Bacon, we’re left to assume that some kind of tenderness follows the rituals.

But Dyer becomes plagued with nightmares--a recurring image is of himself, naked and covered in blood, rolling off a diving board, presumably into an abyss. Whether Dyer’s dreams inspired Bacon’s paintings or whether posing for the paintings triggers the nightmares is left to conjecture. Whatever the case, Dyer swiftly becomes totally dependent upon Bacon--who is generous with money and fancy clothes but nothing else--and commences a steady diet of booze and pills.

Throughout Dyer’s disintegration Bacon remains ice-cold, a sarcastic wit indifferent to his lover’s fate, so much so you start to wonder whether the younger man’s coming apart is some sort of sexual turn-on and inspiration for the painter. After all, Bacon is an artist who rhapsodizes about the inherent beauty in car accidents, the bloodier the better, it would seem.

The heart of the matter seems familiar enough. Bacon, like many other self-absorbed creative geniuses, pours so much emotion into his work he has none left over for anything or anybody else. At the end of the day he heads to a bar where he spends his evenings with a group of regulars who are just as bitchy and boring as he is.

When Dyer, who unaccountably loves Bacon, comes along, he can be sure to be the subject of ridicule. (Maybury has said that the Bacon-Dyer relationship represents “a fatal attraction between the upper and working classes,” but there’s nothing very upper-classy about Bacon.)

Jacobi, formidable actor that he is, has re-created Bacon to a degree that’s uncanny. His Bacon is so outrageously detached from Dyer’s suffering that he would seem darkly funny had not Craig, in a portrayal that is harrowing in the fullest sense, made us so thoroughly believe in Dyer’s pain and anguish. Perhaps Maybury, who worked with the late Derek Jarman as a costume and set designer, means to suggest that Bacon’s hollowness as a man and the ferocity of his paintings represent an ultimate expression of gay self-loathing nurtured by a homophobic society.

Whatever the case, for all the brilliance of Jacobi and Craig, “Love Is the Devil,” which has a bold, seductive Ryuichi Sakamoto score, doesn’t yield enough fresh insight and meaning to make it worth putting up with its unrelieved degradation.

* Unrated. Times guidelines: nudity, drugs, excessive alcohol, sadomasochism, extreme adult themes, language.

‘Love Is the Devil’

Derek Jacobi: Francis Bacon

Daniel Craig: George Dyer

Tilda Swinton: Muriel Belcher

Anne Lambton: Isabel Rawthorne

A Strand release of a BBC Films-BFI--Premiere Heuere--Uplink and the Arts Council of England presentation of a BFI production in association with Partners in Crime with the assistance to State. Executive producers Ben Gibons (BFI) and Frances-Anne Solomon (BBC). Writer-director John Maybury. Producer Chiara Menage. Cinematographer John Mathieson. Music Ryuichi Sakamoto. Production designer Alan Macdonald. Art director Christina Moore. Running time: 1 hour, 30 minutes.

* At selected theaters.