” love is the devil ” is a challenging film , munundating its audience with wild imagery and a plot structure that disallows a plot , perhaps in an attempt to get us to know the artist’s psyche rather than the artist’s lifeline .
watching it , i was enthralled with the look of the film , the way the director shot everything like it was looking through a bizarre , personalized filter .
everything looks like it is not how life looks like but how painter francis bacon , the film’s subject , looked at it personally .
but while i was engrossed , i stumbled upon my thoughts halfway through the film , awakened from my trance by some inner distraction , and began to try and follow what’s going on .
exactly what was i looking at ?
watching this film , i wasn’t sure if it was the most insightful film i had ever seen or the most vacuous .
directed ( and written ) by john maybury , ” love is the devil ” is stylish masterpiece for the senses .
everything looks originally bizarre and perplexing .
the camera angles are ferociously askew , and the close-ups are uncomfortably too close .
the editing is deft , occasionally cutting away to something bizarre every couple seconds , but other times holding on a shot for so long that you wonder if the audience is not supposed to be voyeurs , or rather , intruders to bacon’s world and psyche .
as such , there is no real story .
i’ve not heard much about francis bacon that i didn’t read prior to the film , but what i learned was this : he was a painter in england who reached his peak during the 60s and 70s , drawing hideously bizarre drawings of carnage and the like .
he was one of the first to really come out of the closet , and in interviews , he was notoriously drunk yet incredibly witty .
as played by great shakesperean actor derek jacobi , he’s like a foppish and self-absorbed cross between oscar wilde and nero .
he lives life the way he wants to live it , to the disatisfaction of those who have the privelege of being really close to him .
it’s as if he were taking delight in the destruction of others and maybe himself ( ” champagne for my real friends , and pain for my sham friends , ” he says one night at the bar he frequents ) .
” love is the devil ” chronicles the latter part of his life .
bacon , well-known in his mid-life , awakens one night when he hears a man tumble through his ceiling window and land on the floor .
he walks in , unafraid of what he finds , and discovers a thief , george dyer ( daniel craig ) .
bacon gives him an offer : if he spends the night with him , he can take anything he wants in the morning .
george agrees to this , and off to bed he goes , but ends up staying with him , for whatever reason .
the film shows their lives together , at least in reference to one another .
while creating bacon’s world of friends ( like ” high art , ” this film minors in showing a certain group of people who radiate a connection that is not shown but is understood ) , the film shows the relationship of bacon and george as it remains rather stagnant .
bacon is haughty and bizarre ; george is simple and doesn’t understand bacon in the least , especially not his paintings .
while watching this , that’s basically all i thought was there .
the film has a hypnotic feel , free of any restraints of form , and is shot so uniquely that i felt my attention was almost entirely on the way this film was made rather than what it is about .
once the film is over , it’s easier to piece it together .
i kept on thinking about this film , wondering what the point to all of it was .
someone doesn’t merely make a film of all style and no substance at all , and if they do , they do it by accident , but still allow some substance to creep in .
thinking about it , i remembered how the two fed off of eachother .
i thought about how bacon was a masochist , in love with cruelty ( in one scene , he watches a boxing match with a orgiastic delight , and lets out a squeal of pleasure when blood from the one boxer’s head splashes across his face ; in another scene , he masturbates to the odessa steps sequence of eisenstein’s ” battleship potemkin ” ) , and perhaps he drove george too far in his delight for pain .
he drove him over the edge , and for him that was love , even if it wasn’t for george .
i guess that explains the title .
a bit .
that’s great and all , but i almost wish the film was devoid of any meaning .
i wish it hadn’t reduced itself to making some point about humanity , about how love is the most selfish thing in the world ( and it is , if you look at it a certain way ) .
or maybe if it had avoided any meaning about humanity and merely drove itself into being the one film that was truly inside one man’s twisted pysche .
it’s almost always best to obtain insights from looking at one man’s uniqueness than it is forcing universality down an audience’s throat .
that way you don’t reduce your film to something it’s just not .
i can’t say i totally enjoyed ” love is the devil , ” though .
despite all of the things i respect about this movie , it’s still rather uncomfortable to sit through .
even at a normally trite length of ninety minutes , the film still seems like an arduous task to sit through , especially after an exhausting first hour .
though hypnotic , it still almost seems gimmicky and even redundant at times , as if it were taking advantage of one man’s truly bizarre nature but not doing anything deeper with it .
as such , i respect the way the film looks .
it’s beautiful and painstakingly crafted so that , along with ” what dreams may come ” and ” dark city , ” it’s the year’s most visually stunning film .
in fact , if a better script had been forged , i’d almost compare it in visual power to a peter greenaway film , complete with similar haunting images that stick in the mind forever .
and with a dymanite performance by derek jacobi , it has the comic and distanced tone that it needs .
i just wish it had been more than mostly style and just a hair bit of substance .
then i would have had something to hold me over even now .