As the director's surrogate in Michelangelo Antonioni's Beyond The Clouds, John Malkovich talks about his compulsion to keep making movies, explaining its roots in a belief that beneath each image lies another that's closer to reality. The compulsion part is undeniable: The 83-year-old Antonioni (L'Avventura, Blowup), who suffered a 1985 stroke that left him partially paralyzed and unable to speak, came back a decade later to direct the film, with German compatriot Wim Wenders (Wings Of Desire) serving as a standby for insurance purposes. But beneath the pristine images in Beyond The Clouds lies not reality so much as the emperor's clothes, the empty modernist strokes of an artist with a dried-out palette. Based on short stories from an Antonioni collection titled That Bowling Alley On The Tiber, each of the film's four parts is introduced by Malkovich through pretentious, Wenders-directed interludes. The first, about a maddeningly oblique encounter between two beautiful young people (Inés Sastre and Kim Rossi-Stuart), is a sign of things to come. Though mutually attracted, they spend a regretful night in separate hotel rooms; three years later, they meet again by chance, but rather than make love, he leaves her strewn naked on the bed, presumably satisfied with the memory of her untarnished beauty. The next two are no less remote: One with Malkovich drawn to a "character" (Sophie Marceau, also naked) acquitted of stabbing her father 12 times, the other with Peter Weller as a married man who continues a three-year love affair with a younger woman (Chiara Caselli, again naked), while his wife (Fanny Ardent) meets another man (Jean Reno). Only the last segment, about a stranger (Vincent Pérez) infatuated with a convent-bound Catholic woman (Irene Jacob), has traces of Antonioni's magic; one line, when she rebuffs his love by saying, "It would be like lighting a candle in a room full of light," is as close to real emotion as the film ever gets. An exquisitely composed softcore glossed in blank philosophical musings, Beyond The Clouds could be a parody of a European art film. Despite his limited faculties, Antonioni seems very much in control of his craft, as he reduces an all-star cast to listless pawns in his grand, obscure design.