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

1998 · John Maybury · Love Is the Devil: Study for a Portrait of Francis Bacon on Sightlines

5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 3 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.

On a first viewing

  1. Watch faces stretch and swell through glass, mirrors, or water. (camera)

    Mathieson shoots key moments through curved surfaces so a nose or jaw blooms out of proportion, echoing Bacon's own distorted painted heads.

    Payoff: You are watching Bacon's paintings built out of the real world instead of shown on a wall. In the reading: crystalline-description. The reading calls this a crystalline description, an image that replaces the missing paintings rather than merely referring to them.

  2. Watch figures pinned in a pool of light against total black. (light)

    Mathieson isolates bodies in shallow cages of light surrounded by engulfing dark, the color leaning toward bruised reds and greens in the clubs and studio.

    Payoff: The lighting traps people the same way Bacon's paintings cage his figures on the canvas.

  3. Notice how often a doorway or mirror frames a character. (staging)

    Maybury repeatedly boxes his actors inside doorways, mirrors, and bed frames, echoing the geometric cages Bacon drew around his painted figures.

    Payoff: The rooms themselves start to hold people the way a canvas holds a body.

  4. Watch Jacobi's face shift from cruelty to tenderness in one line. (performance)

    Jacobi plays Bacon fluent in the cutting aphorism and the generous remark within the same breath, never settling into one register.

    Payoff: You are never sure whether you are watching affection or an attack, which is the point. In the reading: reflexive-vs-intensive-face. The reading calls this an intensive face, small movements working the surface rather than one settled expression.

  5. Listen for Sakamoto's spare score against the lurid images. (sound)

    The music stays melancholy, modern, and understated, refusing to match the excess of what's on screen or supply period nostalgia.

    Payoff: The restraint in the music keeps the film from tipping into pure sensation.

Once you have seen it

  1. Notice the film already stands in the shadow of Dyer's death. (structure)

    The affair is told less as a sequence of events than as a memory field collapsing toward a catastrophe you already know is coming.

    Payoff: Knowing the end in advance changes what you notice. Every tenderness plays as something already lost.

  2. Watch for the recurring flash-image of Dyer falling. (cutting)

    Goddard's cutting interrupts the chronology with this image and other nightmare inserts, so the relationship's collapse is built into the film's structure, not just its story.

    Payoff: The editing itself starts to break down the way the relationship does. In the reading: onirosign. The reading calls this an onirosign, a dream-image where the cut stops following cause and effect and starts following dread.

  3. Watch the shot of Dyer on the toilet, staged like a painting. (setting)

    Maybury restages one of Bacon's own famous compositional subjects as a living tableau rather than copying it as an image.

    Payoff: The film keeps finding ways to be about Bacon's paintings without ever showing you one.

Carry this in: Watch every warped surface, glass, mirror, water. Each one stands in for a Bacon painting the film cannot show you.

A Deleuzian reading of Love Is the Devil: Study for a Portrait of Francis Bacon →

How Love Is the Devil: Study for a Portrait of Francis Bacon was received →