Love Is the Devil: Study for a Portrait of Francis Bacon

In 1964 a burglar breaks into Francis Bacon's studio and is caught. Bacon makes him an offer: come to bed and take whatever you want. The man is George Dyer, and for the next seven years he is Bacon's lover, his model, and a person steadily coming apart. John Maybury directs. Derek Jacobi plays Bacon and Daniel Craig plays Dyer, with Tilda Swinton as the proprietor of the Colony Room in Soho. Ryuichi Sakamoto wrote the score. The defining constraint was permission. Bacon's estate refused the use of his paintings. Maybury treated that as a method rather than a problem: instead of showing the work he pushed the camera through glass, mirrors and distorting lenses to imitate how Bacon saw. Faces bend, bodies come apart. The film does not look at the paintings. It looks out from inside them. Dyer died in a Paris hotel room in 1971, two days before the opening of Bacon's great retrospective at the Grand Palais. Bacon painted that for the rest of his life. Who it is for: viewers who want a film about an artist that refuses biography and argues through form instead. Who it is not for: anyone hoping to learn Bacon's life. The film offers a state of mind, not information, and has no interest in chronology.