Fleshed Out

THE OPENING CREDITS OF LOVE IS THE DEVIL, John Maybury’s unconventional 1998 biopic of the painter Francis Bacon, play out over elusive, elliptical images of a man falling through a black, undefined space. The figure’s descent is accompanied by the dissonant wails of Ryuichi Sakamoto’s score, which helps to establish the emotional world of both the film and its artist subject. The frames of Bacon’s paintings are unusually unforgiving, delineating a world of tormenting loneliness whose inhabitants are often cordoned off in yet another layer of encasement, be they clinical vitrines or various doorways to oblivion.

The atonal chilliness of the soundtrack gives another dimension to this sense of isolation, and recalls Bacon’s musical contemporaries, the postwar modernists who, like the painter, made their names giving voice to the subjective extremities of the nuclear era’s existential turbulence. And yet