Unconventionally shot but otherwise conventional, Love Is The Devil is the year's artiest art film about an artist's relationship to his art. A hellish portrait of the sadomasochistic affair between British artist Francis Bacon (Derek Jacobi) and his model/lover George Dyer (Daniel Craig), the film is full of nightmarish imagery, visual abstractions, claustrophobic sets, and scenes shot out of focus. Since little of Bacon's artwork appears in the movie, writer/director John Maybury, who worked as a costume and set designer under the late Derek Jarman and has also directed a number of music videos, has fashioned his film as a suitably disturbing substitute. Viewers get to see boxing matches and scenes from Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin through Bacon's eyes, the images distorted and smeared with bloody reds. But Maybury favors the emotional end of the relationship between Bacon and his favorite subject over the artistic one. Though Craig plays the dominant role in the couple's sex life, he's clearly the needy and submissive one when it comes to day-to-day dealings. As for Jacobi's Bacon, his callous and mean-spirited treatment of his pitiful partner could be titled Portrait Of The Artist As An Asshole. Maybury uses Bacon's immediate circle of friends and associates to comment on the troubled relationship, as if Ryuichi Sakamoto's dark electronic score and stylized images of a blood-soaked nude man plunging to his death are too subtle to project the message. It's all a bit too much to swallow, and the frequent fades between scenes never let the film gather emotional steam. Ultimately, Love Is The Devil is neither illuminating nor, beyond its audacious composition, especially eye-opening. It's just a thankfully short, flamboyant biopic.