Just a faint scent of the woman

Barbora Bobulova stars as the young Coco Chanel in Lifetime's three-hour biopic. (Lifetime Television)

What if you started this review thinking it was about tonight's new Lifetime movie "Coco Chanel," only to discover it was really about a hot-cocoa TV channel? Because if bait-and-switch bothers you, you might be a little thrown by this three-hour biopic, which supposedly stars Shirley MacLaine as the influential fashion designer who invented the little black dress.

MacLaine is indeed in the film, but just barely. She plays the difficult older Chanel, who appears periodically to gruffly utter a few fashion truisms in 1954 - "To be irreplaceable, you have to be different," "Freedom is never out of style" - before the movie flashes back at great length over Chanel's early life. The star of the movie is really Barbora Bobulova, a Slovak actress who looks like Mary Louise Parker or Jaclyn Smith and definitely not Shirley MacLaine. Bobulova plays the seamstress of humble origins who is unlucky in love over and over again. Of course, MacLaine, and not Bobulova, has been the face of Lifetime's promotional push.

"Coco Chanel," tonight at 8, also doesn't feel like the story of a fashion icon, never mind one who revolutionized women's clothing. The movie, "freely inspired" by Chanel's life, plays like a generic, picturesque, gauzy tale of romance in France during the first half of the 20th century, with world war, and not world fashion, as the backdrop. The heroine's name could as easily be Smith as Chanel. There are castles and horses and bucketloads of l'amour, all loosely strung around a few vague facts about Chanel's life. Let's hope that Lifetime's "Project Runway," due next year after the series finishes on Bravo, is less beside the point. Lifetime appears to think viewers will have little interest in the evolution of clothes design.

First, the working-class Chanel falls for a wealthy nobleman, Etienne (Sagamore Stevenin), who refuses to marry her, despite having lived with her and compromised her reputation. Then she travels rough roads with Etienne's friend, a more sincere fellow named Boy (Olivier Sitruk). Ultimately, she develops a mistrust of men that the movie, directed by Christian Duguay, links by a slight thematic thread to her design philosophy - giving women what women want, not what men think they want. Even with its epic length, "Coco Chanel" manages to reveal almost no details about the invention of Chanel's aesthetic or her perfume.

The script, credited to three writers, is terribly sloppy, on top of its lazy reliance on fairy-tale formulas. Characters who seem potentially important disappear, such as Chanel's sister; and then a guy played by Malcolm McDowell is presented as the older Chanel's partner without any back story. And the acting ranges from the unremarkable to, in MacLaine's case, the noncommittal. MacLaine seems to have just come to the set of "Coco Chanel," put on a hat, and switched on her tough-broad machine. The movie looks great, like a very extended perfume commercial. But it has no substance. Indeed, I don't think the owners of the Chanel label themselves could have made a more harmless movie.

Matthew Gilbert can be reached at gilbert@globe.com. For more on TV, visit www.boston.com/ae/tv/blog.