Rotten Tomatoes
Movie Info
This British biographical drama probes the life of painter Francis Bacon (1909-1992), critically acclaimed as the outstanding British painter of the latter half of the 20th Century. This unsympathetic portrait of Bacon (Derek Jacobi) begins when George Dyer (Daniel Craig), a small-time criminal from working-class East End environs, drops through a skylight to rob Bacon's studio -- and is ordered into bed by Bacon. The two become a familiar couple at Bacon's hangout, the Colony Room in Soho. Bacon's sexual interests lean toward S&M, but as the cruel Bacon loses interest in Dyer and begins to look elsewhere, the couple splits. Left to his own devices, Dyer turns to drugs and alcohol -- and a tragic suicide. Visual grotesqueries and a trancelike Ryuichi Sakamoto music score capture the essence of Bacon's work (although paintings by Bacon are not seen onscreen here). The film is told in the form of a flashback from Bacon's successful 1971 retrospective at the Grand Palais in Paris to a period in the mid-'60s. Bacon biographer Daniel Farson (The Gilded Gutter Life of Francis Bacon) served as consultant on the film. ~ Bhob Stewart, Rovi
Love Is the Devil – read the original review
On its release in 1998, the Guardian hailed John Maybury's biopic of Francis Bacon as a 'brilliantly sustained imagining'. Read Richard Williams' full review below
Email
Exceptional … Love Is the Devil. Photograph: Ronald Grant Archive
I came out of John Maybury's Love Is the Devil, which is rather coyly subtitled "Study for a portrait of Francis Bacon", feeling I'd never seen a film that makes such direct and illuminating connection with the eye of an artist. On the other hand, I didn't know Francis Bacon, so I can't tell whether the story Maybury tells us is true, in the literal sense. That bothers me. But if you want a brilliantly sustained imagining of how, according to some of the best available evidence, Bacon saw his world, and how he rendered that vision on to canvas, then Love Is the Devil is a very remarkable film indeed
.
.Their first encounter is handled with deft
humour. When Dyer falls through the skylight, an amused and aroused Bacon invites him to bed. Maybury, best known for his design work on the films of Derek Jarman and his
Adrian Scarborough as the creepy Farson and Karl Johnson as the pathetic Deakin make a fine pair of stooges, and a witches' chorus is provided by Tilda Swinton as the foulmouthed Muriel Belcher, Anne Lambton as the perceptive Isabel Rawsthorne and Annabel Brooks as the cheerily libidinous Henrietta Moraes. Unwise cameos by the painter Gary Hume and the fashion journalist Hamish Bowles – as a Moraes conquest and a limp-wristed David Hockney, respectively – momentarily contradict but cannot do real damage to the prevailing seriousness of an exceptional film.
• This review was originally published in the Guardian on 18 Sep 1998
No comments:
Post a Comment