CALENDAR: MOVIES : A Face That Tells the Story : The Swiss-born actress Irene Jacob has a remarkable ability to express her characters’ emotional upheavals with very few words.

If you saw Krzysztof Kieslowski’s new film, “Red,” and fell in love with actress Irene Jacob--it’s hard to imagine anyone seeing the film and not being enchanted by her--you’ll be happy to hear that off-screen, the 28-year-old actress is a lot like Valentine, her character in the film.

Radiantly beautiful, of course--anybody can see that like Valentine, Jacob is a knockout. But the subtler qualities that illuminate Jacob’s character in the film--her modesty, her thoughtfulness and sensitivity--are part of Jacob as well.

Most memorably seen in Kieslowski’s 1991 film, “The Double Life of Veronique” (for which she won that year’s best actress award at Cannes), the Swiss-born Jacob comes across during an interview in a Westwood hotel as an empathetic woman of great intelligence. It’s not surprising to learn that her favorite actresses are Gena Rowlands, Giulietta Masina and Ingrid Bergman--Jacob has a luminous grace evocative of those stellar women.

Making her film debut in 1987 with a small part in Louis Malle’s “Au Revoir, Les Enfants,” Jacob has worked nonstop since then, appearing in six films. None of them, however, has made use of her talents as fully as “Red” does.

The final film in Kieslowski’s trilogy based on the three colors of the French flag--which represent liberty (blue), equality (white) and fraternity--”Red,” which opened Friday, co-stars Jacob with Jean-Louis Trintignant in the story of the relationship between a model and a retired judge. Exploring the themes of destiny and loneliness, the film is ultimately a moving meditation on how mysterious love is, and how it often arrives unheralded from the most unexpected quarters looking nothing like we’d imagined it would.

“The main character in the film is the relationship between this woman and the judge because they reveal themselves through each other,” Jacob says. “Without them together we don’t know who they are and wouldn’t care.

“In life, it’s often the case that we don’t know who we are until we meet some other person,” she says. “Sometimes we’re ready for them, sometimes we’re not, but we depend on these meetings in the quest to discover ourselves. When Kieslowski directed us, he wasn’t so interested in what Jean-Louis or I were doing--he was interested in capturing the way these two people were affecting each other.”

Jacob’s compelling presence in “Red” is doubly impressive when one realizes that hers is a reactive role that gives her little to do other than listen when she’s spoken to, and observe life going on around her. Using nothing more than her expressive face, she telegraphs the upheavals of the soul this woman is experiencing.

“The judge is important to Valentine because he asks her really important questions. She’s hungry for this because her life isn’t satisfying to her,” Jacob says. “Her mother lives in another country, she has a boyfriend but he’s away, and her work doesn’t require anything deep from her. She feels alone but can do nothing about it.

“Suddenly this man involves her on a profound level, and this is the first gift he gives. His next gift is teaching her that there are limits to what you can do and that you can’t interfere in everybody’s life.”

In watching the film, one is struck by the fact that its two main characters, as well as two minor ones, are alone virtually all the time. They are alone in their cars, in their apartments, doing errands, walking their dogs; their moments of connection with others invariably occur over the telephone. Indeed, the telephone, the 20th Century’s great vehicle of controlled intimacy, is a central character in the film.

“Basically we are alone--even with people we love, there is a limit to our closeness,” Jacob says. “Kieslowski said this film could be called ‘short stories of the telephone,’ and I think most of us lead this kind of life today. It’s tempting to say man lives a lonelier, more isolated existence today than he did 100 years ago, but look at ‘Madame Bovary’--no, man was plagued by loneliness then too.

“The characters in Kieslowski’s films are almost always alone,” she adds, “because basically what interests him is to find his character alone, not knowing what to do.”

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‘Red” marks a rare appear ance for Trintignant, who became a star in 1956 with his performance opposite Bridget Bardot in Roger Vadim’s “And God Created Woman.” Subsequent starring roles in art-house classics such as “A Man and a Woman” and “Z” won him an international following; however, Trintignant has worked infrequently in recent years because of health problems.

“I grew up seeing Jean-Louis’ films--’The Conformist’ and ‘My Night at Maud’s’ are my favorites--so it was wonderful working with him,” Jacob says. “Because of qualities in Jean-Louis, he was able to bring so much to the character of the judge--you can feel the curiosity and compassion beneath his pain and cynicism, and he makes you like very much a man who initially seems unlikable.

“By the end of the film it almost seems that these two people are in a state of deep love, but Kieslowski wanted them to maintain a distance,” she says. “He didn’t want us to imagine they’ll now start a life together--he wanted them separated by time. Because this is a film about fraternity, Kieslowski wanted to look at two people who have no reason to be involved with one another, but who share something really important. Ultimately, it’s a very optimistic film because it’s rooted in the belief that people can affect each other.”

With the completion of “Red,” Kieslowski vowed that he had made his last film. Anyone familiar with the 53-year-old director’s works--his 10-film study of the Ten Commandments, “The Decalogue,” for instance, or “Veronique”--is no doubt hoping he won’t keep his word.

“He was so tired after doing three films in a row (“Red” was preceded by the release, since last December, of “Blue” and “White”) that he didn’t want to involve himself again in the process of writing, shooting and editing,” Jacob says. “I hope he won’t feel obliged to stick by his declaration if he changes his mind.

“Kieslowski has an extraordinarily generous way of working,” she continues. “He listens to people with great care and uses words himself sparingly. He doesn’t talk about his story because he’s trying to touch elusive and delicate feelings. He’s interested in the difficulties of life--loneliness, separation, contradiction--and he tries to speak about these things in a concrete way.”

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Jacob was born in Geneva in 1966, the youngest child and only girl among four children. Her father was a physicist, her mother a psychologist, and Jacob says she was raised in a Protestant family that “had a revolution.”

“My family was very shy with feelings and never spoke about them, but we evolved a little bit. I think part of the reason I was attracted to theater was because I wanted to be close to stories because they could help me relate to my family.”

Jacob’s interest in performing was ignited when she was 12 and saw the films of Charlie Chaplin. “They took my heart,” she recalls. “They made me laugh and cry, and this was exactly what I was waiting for in a film, to awaken me to my feelings.”

In 1984 Jacob earned the equivalent of a two-year college degree in languages (she speaks English, German, Italian and French); then, at the age of 18, she moved to Paris.

“I moved to Paris because I wanted to live in an artistic environment where I could express myself and argue, and I couldn’t find this in Switzerland.

“I arrived there and it was very lonely for me, despite the fact that my brother who’s a musician was also living there (her other two brothers are scientists). I got a job selling things like dictionaries over the phone and enrolled full time at a national drama school. This school was free if you passed the audition, which I fortunately did.”

Three years after her arrival in Paris, Jacob was cast in “Au Revoir, Les Enfants,” and her career has been roaring along at full throttle ever since. After wrapping “Red” in 1993, she took nine months off and did a lot of reading (Tolstoy, Balzac, Singer and several autobiographies), but since that break she has completed two more films.

Last spring, she completed “All Men Are Mortal,” an adaptation of the novel by Simone de Beauvoir, which was shot in Budapest and also stars Stephen Rea.

“He’s a wonderful actor,” she says of Rea. “He’s really very shy, but we had a lovely time--he’s quite generous as a partner.

“I play an ambitious actress who’s never satisfied,” she says of the film. “One day she meets this man in the street who’s a bum and they have a romance. It so happens that this man is immortal--but he, too, is ultimately mortal inside, in that his capacity to love has limits. De Beauvoir wrote this book just after World War II and in a sense it was about the survivors of the war who were unable to reinvolve themselves in life.”

From Budapest, Jacob went directly to the Berlin set of “Victory,” an adaptation of a Joseph Conrad story directed by Mark Peploe, for release next summer.

“It’s set at the beginning of the century and I play a violinist in an all-girl orchestra in the Far East,” says Jacob of the film, which also stars Willem Dafoe and Sam Neill.

“This girl falls in love with the character played by Willem Dafoe, who is a very difficult man unwilling to open himself to love. She has a very sad life, yet she still has trust, and this is often the case with our heroes. Tolstoy said that heroes are those who fight against inner death--which is to stop believing in love and trust.”

Jacob will soon head for the south of France to shoot a sequence in “Beyond the Clouds,” a film composed of five short stories that will be co-directed by Wim Wenders and Michelangelo Antonioni. Based on an idea by Antonioni, the script was co-written by both directors. From there, she’ll head for the set of a film directed by Trintignant’s ex-wife, Nadine Trintignant, which stars his daughter, Marie.

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Somewhere along the way, she hopes she’ll have a minute to see her family, to whom she remains close.

“Not long ago I went to see my grandparents and I was very sad that day because of a separation,” she recalls. “As I was leaving, my grandfather said, ‘Goodby, Irene--you will find more pain!’ He thought this was the most reassuring thing he could say to me, and I laughed despite how sad I was feeling.

“It’s funny, you can be deep in serious thought one minute, and laughing the next, and this is something I try to remember in my work,” she says. “I always try to touch these two things; our lightness of being which is sometimes unbearable, and our depth which is surprising and admirable.”