Baceseras

"Greetings from Tim Buckley" sidesteps the conventions of the musical biopic. It's a no-pressure, just-hanging-out movie. You can easily forget that what you're seeing is scripted or acted at all; the feeling is as of a friendly fly-on-the-wall documentary. The subject is Jeff Buckley, son of Tim Buckley, the prodigiously gifted hippie-era troubadour who died young. Jeff scarcely knew his father. The film covers a span of a week when Jeff (Penn Badgley) takes up an open-ended invitation to a memorial concert given by some of Tim's friends and associates. At this point in his life Jeff is noodling around with music himself, not quite seriously - and he agrees to perform one of Tim's songs at the concert. While Jeff mixes with the musicians, explores New York, - and caries on a week-long lunch-date flirtation with one of the show's producers (played by Imogen Poots) - he also digs into his past, or it digs into him. He's trying to read the pre-history of his own consciousness, and there are no records of that. Here glows the young Tim Buckley (Ben Rosenfield), in flashbacks or in old raw footage. Just a few flashes of edge and dazzle to suggest why he became a legend. Even when he's all beat out, his nimbus doesn't desert him - they slump beat together (and a beat nimbus is something to see); with the best will in the world, too weary to be as congenial as his record label would like. Is it the nimbus of an angel or a pop star? Whichever it really is, it's pressed into service as the other one too. Tim Buckley was only 28 when he died. So much still in the realm of possibility, unanswerable. The melancholy undertone of the film is how for Jeff, his father's absence is a presence. You may come to feel that this is a movie about a haunting, a daylight ghost story. It has to be elusive; what stays with you is the music.

This film about the complicated bonds of love and loyalty between two brothers is carried forward on the strength of its mysteries. The profoundest mysteries inhere in the subject, of course; others arise from Gianni Amelio's elliptical, episodic approach. Beginning in 1958, the brothers are part of the Sicilian migration to the industrialized North of Italy, specifically to the city of Turin. The younger Pietro has been there for a year already, going to school; he's the White Hope of his family, the one with brains, expected to amount to something – and chafing at the responsibility, though delighting in the bella figura he gets to cut. The elder brother Giovanni arrives intending just a short visit, but winds up staying on; at first sight he's a sweet-natured lunk, but then we see his steel. He goes to work to support Pietro's schooling; is exploited by the labor brokers who take an extortionate cut of the migrants' wages; little by little gets out from under them, and then replaces them: a familiar migrant's tale, one that usually brings tragedy in its wake.

Everyone in the film is more and different than a first estimate can take in. They make choices that defy our prediction. We see the effects, but learn the why and wherefore only partially, and always belatedly – just before the story propels us forward a year or so in time, and we have to get our bearings all over again.

The large-scale recreation of the city of Turin in its historical moment is beautiful, melancholy and alluring. Amelio has a showman- poet's sense of just how long to tantalize us before pulling back to reveal the full scope of this wonder: those are moments of quiet awe. At times, too, the characters are foregrounded while the city stretches wide and deep – miles deep – behind them. It almost could be rear-projection or green-screen trickery, but then the characters turn and walk off into the distance, which is real. The city feels a living thing then. And as they move away from us there comes a pang, as if foreboding a time when the loss will be final.

A documentary of a painter, painting, "Dream of Light" is at the same time a work of fiction. That's how it seems to go whenever a documentary takes narrative form: even the most straightforward story can only come about by shaping; and where you have shaping, fiction will get in, like dust – you can't keep it out. You might as well welcome it (fiction, that is, not dust so much); consider it a feature, not a bug.

As you watch the artist in Victor Erice's film set up his painting apparatus, you may wonder where all his meticulousness is to lead. He is painting en plein air, but no Impressionist he; he carries Academic studio practice out of doors, and the lengths he goes to might give even some Academicians the quivers. The more you see of his method, the more there is to question; but given no explanation all you can do is watch and wait.

The time is summer, the subject is a quince tree in the garden. The painter, an elderly gent, goes about his work without hesitation or hurry: his confidence is palpable; it seems he knows what he's doing. The garden where he sets up is tiny, cramped between the wall to the street and the wall of his house. He starts by constructing a box- like frame around his tree. He puts dabs of white paint, then more and more of them, on branch and twig, leaf and fruit: a constellation of dots. A taut white string traverses and segments his field of vision, and a plumb-line, defining the vertical, segments it again. He locks and marks the position of his easel's legs, and the height of the rail on which his canvas rests. When he takes up his stance to paint, he drives nails into the ground marking where his feet go. His purpose, with all this marking and measuring, is to find his place, over the course of the work – each day to find the exact place where he left off the previous day, despite all the changes brought on by weather, accident, or growth of the tree. He's in it for the long haul: you can almost hear him saying, I mean to fight it out on this line if it takes all summer.

Given the artist's structural, architectural set-up, you might think when he finally addressed himself to his canvas he'd first reach to the structure of his subject: that his brush in a stroke or two would find the spine in the quince's mottled trunk, or the essential geometry in its tangle of limbs. Or alternatively that he'd lay on areas of color, or of light and dark, to establish his picture's space, then work to refine it toward completion. What you wouldn't guess is that he'd begin, as he does, with cautious, abruptly punctuated strokes, to draw, in ghost gray, a short segment of a branch, as it presents itself to him near front and center of his tree – with a stubby bit of twig extending up from it; and a forlorn little leaf, half-folded back upon itself. More like something from the margin of a sketchbook, this botanical detail floats, alone, in the middle of his blank white canvas: floats there for days it seems, as he works at an inchworm crawl, with rubbing and corrections, to get the bark ridges just right, the texture. This is drawing; and please, sir, when will we have painting?

Are we even supposed to ask? Whether the artist ever used this method before, and whether it proved successful, we can't know. Has he set himself up to fail? Erice quiets us with the sensual calm that holds the scene and all in it. And the very definiteness of the old man's activity wants to persuade us that all will be well. So does his whole demeanor: he wears such a lived-in face; and is too absorbed in what he's doing to put on a show for us. Visitors drop by; conversation is desultory, a bit of reminiscence mixed in; the tip-tap of workers' hammers somewhere off. Summer seems endless, though it's passing away. The camera, like a patient naturalist, observes, does not interrogate – and the artist-subject, being asked no questions, answers none, but simply goes about his business.