Coco Chanel

Bobulova is delightful to watch, playing the younger Coco as winsome, stubborn, independent and gifted. MacLaine, seen always with a cigarette between two fingers, has less screen time, but she commands every minute in which she appears.

While little of this is boring, the movie only sizzles and sparks when it jumps out of flashback mode and into the 1950s "present," with Ms. MacLaine as a slightly cranky and tottering but totally grand old dame.

We don't get a great deal of character development, nor do we always get the truth, but with Coco, there is plenty to see and do.

Perhaps appropriately, the period trappings and costumes are impeccable, part of a miniseries that weaves six production logos into its hemline--suggesting more commerce than art in its conception.

Czech actress Barbora Bobulova has the greater misfortune of acting out Harlequin-romance shenanigans amid Pepé le Pew accents. Worst of all, the subject's revolutionary designs are almost entirely marginalized.

A little whitewashing is forgivable in a biopic, but to make a movie about the most influential figure in fashion history in which she spends more time moping around about her boyfriends than she does designing clothes is infuriating.

The movie looks great, like a very extended perfume commercial. But it has no substance.