CINEMA / Still life with love and quince tree

ON PAPER Victor Erice's The Quince Tree Sun looks a yawn. On paper, or canvas, is where most of the action takes place. Erice's third film in 20 years chronicles the painting, then drawing, of a quince tree by the Spanish artist Antonio Lopez. As in La Belle Noiseuse there are passages where all we see is the artist's hand, flicking and scratching the picture into being. Like watching paint dry, wags have already said. But although the film is often a still life, its themes are vibrant. Into a narrow frame Erice crams a richly suggestive portrait of the artist in the modern world.

Lopez, playing himself (we're never sure if this is documentary or fiction), has a wonderful presence, resembling Francois Truffaut in later years. The first 20 minutes, during which he sets up his work, are the most compelling: a celebration of the intricacy of craftsmanship. We watch him make a plumbline to centre the picture and drive two nails into the ground to stay his feet. He paints white stripes on the quinces to check their positions. His movements are delicate and precise, like a surgeon's. He looks ruefully at the tree, as if knowing the task to be impossible.

This hopeless quest to capture the moment provides the drama of the film. When Lopez is interrupted by the portraitist, Enrique Gran, a lugubrious fellow in train-driver cap, they reminisce about the vanished cafes of student days. They're bound by a love of life and a need to record it before it passes. They break into a wistful romantic melody - after several re-starts at Lopez's insistence. His dedication and disappointment are equal. He's forever bemoaning the changes of light, and as winter encroaches, he turns to drawing. Eventually nature thwarts him completely.

There are longueurs, but they're intended: a gesture against quick-fix culture. Erice includes night shots of a Madrid lit by the glare of televisions through windows of darkened houses. But his art makes us watch and work. In the final section when Lopez has stopped drawing the tree, he lies on a bed and his wife paints him. The camera rapidly switches between canvas and sitter: art is seen as married to life rather than superficially reflecting it.

The point was made in Erice's first film, The Spirit of the Beehive, when a girl became disturbed after watching Frankenstein. The Quince Tree Sun is also wary of the power of film. When Lopez quits, the camera cranes down on the fallen quinces, like a vulture. Erice is admitting that film always lacks the depth and personality of painting, but his own picture refutes him. Gliding between Lopez's different stances, it's like leafing through Leonardo drawings. The film has its moments of bafflement and boredom, but it's more often serenely enchanting.

Krysztof Zanussi's The Silent Touch is a much more banal study of artistic creation - A Portrait of the Artist as an Old Bore. Max von Sydow plays Henri Kesdi, a dried-up composing legend, eking out his ill health in Denmark with his long-suffering wife (Sarah Miles). It's hard to believe in this J D Salinger of the scales. He seems constructed from cliches - nautical beard, foul mouth and goatish sex drive. Von Sydow booms away like a slimline Leo McKern. Kesdi gave up composing after surviving the Holocaust: 'Genocide makes you realise the absolute pointlessness of music.' Inside this guff a George Steiner essay is trying to get out.

The midwife to Kesdi's musical rebirth is a Polish music student (Lothaire Bluteau), who wakes up one morning with a snatch of Kesdi's music in his head and a mission to help him compose again. Kesdi calls him 'an angel', and we're supposed to see him as having quasi-religious powers. He counters Kesdi's despair: 'The music doesn't belong to you: it's an expression of goodness.' Bluteau is a master of mysterious virtue, but here his spiky fringe and sunken eyes serve only po-faced preachiness. The plot hits a serious wrong note when Henry falls for his winsome American secretary (Sofie Grabol, in a cruelly underwritten part). We're left to decide whether we care less about her pregnancy or Henry's concert return. The movie has the hollowness of the multi-funded Euro-film, written to design rather than inspiration.

Used People, unusually for a comedy, is about misery. Shirley MacLaine plays Pearl, a middle-aged Jewish woman laying to rest her husband and their unhappy marriage. She has two daughters: Marcia Gay Harden, who has movie- star fantasies, and is trying to get over losing a child; and frumpy Kathy Bates, trying to get away from Mother. Completing the unhappy family is grandson Matthew Branton, who's seriously screwed up, believing his dead grandfather is sending him force-fields making him invulnerable to pain. They're more real than people we normally see in this type of film. They're us - only we'd rather not be reminded of it. Into their wrecked lives comes Marcello Mastroianni declaring a long-suppressed love for Pearl, and promising new beginnings and cross-cultural comedy.

The dithering tone never allows the comedy to take flight. The film starts with a Jewish funeral, and you can imagine what Woody Allen might have made of it, but the pathos is on at full volume (with Rachel Portman's score unrelentingly poignant): there are fewer laughs than on a page of Philip Roth. We don't fall under the spell of the leads either. MacLaine, with her Pierrot face and down-cast eyes, seems cold and selfish, and Mastroianni, constantly groping for his straw boater and quotations from Ralph Waldo Emerson, gushes and ingratiates. Beeban Kidron, directing her first American feature, composes her shots smartly, but the whole film drowns in whimsy.

Splitting Heirs is also miserable: writer Eric Idle has lost a python and desperately needs it back. There are times in this tale of the false inheritance of an English dukedom that make the Carry Ons look like Moliere. Idle plays the rightful Duke of Bournemouth, brought up as Tommy Patel owing to a baby mix-up, his Dukedom usurped by Rick Moranis. The humour is as time-honoured as the English aristocracy: mainly double-entendre and bedroom farce. The best laughs are provided by John Cleese as a scheming lawyer. With its cracks at English repression and shots of English estates, the film is aiming at the American market, but it's not a patch on A Fish Called Wanda.

'The Quince Tree Sun' (U): Renoir (837 8402). 'The Silent Touch' (15): Curzon Mayfair (465 8865). 'Night of the Living Dead' (18): MGMs Trocadero (434 0032), Oxford St (636 3851), Chelsea (351 1026). 'Used People' (12): Odeon Haymarket (839 7697). 'Splitting Heirs' (12): Empire Leicester Sq (497 9999) and general release. All nos 071.