Love is the Devil starts in 1971 in Paris, where the controversial British artist Francis Bacon (a truly phenomenal role by Sir Derek Jacobi) is welcomed on the occasion of a major retrospective as the ‘greatest living painter’. During the ceremony, Bacon’s model and lover for seven years George Dyer swallows a frightening amount of drink and pills in their hotel room. As he falls into unconsciousness, he remembers the day they met. He was a cat burglar who fell through bacon’s skylight while trying to break in and came face to face with the artist. The encounter changed his life. Bacon shaped their relationship: masochist in bed, sadist out of it. In the legendary Colony Room Club he surrounded himself with sophisticated dandies, amusing dipsomaniacs and calamites. With Bacon’s growing success, Dyer gradually turned into a pathetic and entirely dependent drug addict.Love Is the Devil is in visual terms a unique film in which Maybury managed to find a cinematographic equivalent of Bacon’s disturbing art. For instance the sneering mistress of the Colony, Tilda Swinton, is only seen distorted through liquor bottles. All the acting in this spectacular visual concept is superb and the actors even manage to evoke a great fascination for their far from sympathetic characters – a great achievement in itself.
