Thanks, P

Can Colin Firth be ``a sexier bad guy'' than John Malkovich? According to this month's Premiere magazine, that's what it will take if Milos Forman's ``Valmont,'' the latest and most expensive film version of ``Dangerous Liaisons,'' hopes to match or top the success of last year's Oscar-winning adaptation of the story.

Firth plays the title role - the Malkovich part - in the $36 million production, which opens in mid-November. To many moviegoers, Malkovich was the chief problem with last year's version, and the success or failure of the Forman film will most likely rest on the actor playing Valmont.

``Milos' version is going to be incredibly different,'' said the 28-year-old Firth during a trip to Seattle this week. ``The characters have the same names, the story is still about sexual manipulation, but that leaves room for a lot of differences.``Our emphasis is not on overtly decadent behavior. `Valmont' has more to do with what it is that works when you manipulate someone. There are hearts beating inside these characters, and you should leave the theater with questions about Valmont's true feelings. If you're not convinced that he can persuade this woman that she's changed him, if that doesn't work, the audience will laugh.''

While Firth is gearing up for the publicity push that will inevitably surround the release of ``Valmont,'' he was actually in town to talk about another movie: Martin Donovan's extraordinary thriller, ``Apartment Zero,'' which opens Friday at the Egyptian. At the Seattle International Film Festival three months ago, it won the audience awards for best picture and director.

Firth plays the very un-Valmontlike part of a repressed, neurotic Buenos Aires film buff named Adrian, who is so obsessed with movies that he declares at one point that he can't be friends with anyone who's never heard of Geraldine Page. When Adrian takes in an American roommate of questionable background (Hart Bochner), their relationship and the film start to function on increasingly complicated psychological-political levels.

``Adrian's only reference point is film,'' said Firth. ``He only understands film language. When Jack (the Bochner character) turns up, it's as if he'd just stepped off the screen and into Adrian's life. Adrian is such a pitiful creature, so transparent; he sees himself as a David Niven character, the perfect English gentleman, but he's really quite pathetic.''

Firth based his characterization on a couple of people he knows, and a ``precious, brittle movie-obsessive'' he once observed at a British art house. He thinks the character's speech patterns ``come out of constipation''; during the shooting of the film, he and Donovan decided to include several scenes in which Adrian talks to himself, once in Spanish.

``I think I gave Adrian a certain neurotic fastidiousness that is not in the script, but Hart had the more difficult job,'' he said. ``He had to appear to be a boring fellow, and it's tough to play that kind of superficially easygoing character. He was very intense about getting it right. I know very few English actors who ever take the job as seriously as Hart did.''

During the three months he stayed in Buenos Aires, Firth became increasingly aware of the political focus of the script, which makes frequent references to the recent repressiveness of the Argentine government.``Just five years ago, they were scooping people up off the street,'' he said. ``I loved the country, which has such an air of sophistication that you can't see why they're repeatedly susceptible to fascism. But it's a very badly damaged place.'' When he returned to England, he was so concerned that he joined Amnesty International.

Born in Hampshire, Firth spent some of his youth in Nigeria and St.Louis before returning to England, where he joined the National Youth Theatre and moved on to the Drama Centre. After playing the lead character, Guy Bennett, in the London stage production of ``Another Country,'' Firth made his movie debut playing Guy's communist friend, Judd, in the 1984 film version. 

``I still get the bulk of my fan mail because of that picture, especially from Japan, where there's a cult for it,'' he said. Firth has also starred in the excellent ``A Month in the Country,'' the best-forgotten 1984 American TV remake of ``Camille,'' and several British television series, including ``The Lost Empires,'' which was shown here on Masterpiece Theatre.

He's just finished another picture, ``Wings of Fame,'' in which he plays the assassin of a movie star played by Peter O'Toole. Most of the picture takes place in the afterlife, at a posh hotel that houses only celebrities who are still famous. Firth ends up there only because he's famous for killing a movie star.``I begged them to put me in that movie,'' he said. ``I'd never seen a script like it. There are no real effects, no `Beetlejuice' makeup, and it's much murkier and less obvious than that picture. But I think it's quite extraordinary.

``I don't know what to do next,'' said Firth, who was so bored with`` The Lost Empires'' that he dropped out of acting for a few months after he'd finished it. ``I really need to stop. I'm always working on the next picture even if I'm not actually shooting it. I have to find out if there is a life between movies.''