Sightlines · reception

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

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

The arc

A prickly Un Certain Regard premiere at Cannes '98 that won acting prizes at Edinburgh but stayed a niche arthouse item — until Daniel Craig became Bond in 2006 and a whole new audience came looking, cementing its slow climb into the queer-cinema canon.

What’s debated

The perennial fight: is Maybury's woozy, distorted style a brilliant translation of Bacon's paintings into cinema, or an art-school affectation that keeps you at arm's length from the man?

Its footprint

It's the film forever cited in 'Daniel Craig before Bond' threads — a young, frequently nude Craig as George Dyer opposite Derek Jacobi's Bacon — and Jacobi himself joked that's exactly why the DVDs kept selling.

Where it stands

A cult fixture of British queer cinema — the artist biopic cinephiles hold up as proof the genre doesn't have to be tasteful, and a staple of LGBTQ+ retrospective programming.

Did you know? The Bacon estate refused to let a single real Bacon painting appear in the film — so Maybury and cinematographer John Mathieson shot the whole thing to LOOK like a Bacon instead, all smeared lenses, mirrors and distortion. The restriction became the style.

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