`MRS. DALLOWAY' MAKES LUKEWARM CONNECTIONS ALONG THE WAY.

Byline: Bob Strauss Daily News Film Critic

A triumph of technique, at least, ``Mrs. Dalloway,'' based on Virginia Woolf's 1925 novel, presents a complicated memory pageant with admirably fluid clarity.

Marleen Gorris, who directed the Dutch Oscar winner ``Antonia's Line,'' takes us from the film's present - a spring day in 1923 London - to a 19th-century estate and the trenches of World War I Italy, into dreams and nightmare visions and through several points of view, and never loses us along the way.

Would that the times and places, and most of the people populating them, were as compelling as their cinematic presentation. There's a flat, rote quality to most of the characters' dilemmas, even with such fine actors as Vanessa Redgrave and Rupert Graves performing them to the best of their formidable abilities.

While Gorris and adapter Eileen Atkins must bear some responsibility for this, I'd suspect the basic fault lies in the material. What were surely cutting-edge concerns back in the Jazz Age - the post-traumatic plights of war veterans, upper-class women's longing for less-restrictive lives - are older news these days. It takes a particularly deft kind of modernizing sensibility, like that displayed in the recent Henry James adaptation ``The Wings of the Dove,'' to breathe new vividness into old insights.

Then there's the problem of Woolf's basic structure, which constantly threatens to trivialize two deeply troubled people's problems by constantly comparing them.

Clarissa Dalloway (Redgrave) is a well-off, middle-age society matron, married to a member of Parliament and recovering from an unmentioned but serious illness. As she makes preparations for an elite dinner party, Clarissa keeps flashing back to a summer in the country, when she was a vibrant young woman choosing her romantic path in life.

The youthful Clarissa is played by Natascha McElhone (``Surviving Picasso,'' ``The Devil's Own''). She's in an upper-crust tizzy over whether she loves the possessive but adventurous Peter Walsh (Alan Cox), the newly met and more solidly grounded Richard Dalloway (Robert Portal) or her best pal, the sexy and rebellious Sally Seton (Lena Headey).

Clarissa gets all swoony whenever any of these people kisses her, but we already know she took the safest option. Back in '23, she now feels unfulfilled and vaguely silly about cherishing her frivolous priorities so. A visit from the older, sadder Peter (Michael Kitchen) doesn't calm her unease.

Meanwhile, the disturbed veteran Septimus Warren Smith (Graves) is wandering about London with his wife (Amelia Bullmore), hearing the big guns instead of Big Ben and seeing ghosts of dead comrades along the garden paths. Smith's struggles with uncomprehending psychiatrists operate, of course, at a whole different dramatic depth than comfortable Clarissa's worries. Even after a connection is established between the two characters' fates, we're still left wondering what one could genuinely have to do with the other.

Other issues brought up in ``Mrs. Dalloway,'' such as the young women's radical social views and the attraction between them, are not satisfactorily resolved. The film certainly offers more than your average British heritage picture in both its concerns and its style. But it falls well short of the better ones.

THE FACTS

The film: ``Mrs. Dalloway'' (PG-13; violence, nudity).

The stars: Vanessa Redgrave, Natascha McElhone, Rupert Graves, Michael Kitchen, Alan Cox, Lena Headey.

Behind the scenes: Directed by Marleen Gorris. Written by Eileen Atkins, based on Virginia Woolf's novel. Produced by Stephen Bayly and Lisa Katselas Pare. Released by First Look Pictures.

Running time:One hour, 37 minutes.

Playing:.Selected theaters.

Our rating: Two and One Half Stars.