ACTRESS GIVES HER OWN 'TWIST' TO LESBIAN LOVE.

Byline: Betsy Sherman Entertainment News Wire

Josiane Balasko is France's Roseanne, without the Looney Tunes personal life. Plump and earthy, the 45-year-old redhead - who has been acting in movies for almost 20 years and directing them for 10 - is French show business' regular gal.

A glamourpuss like Catherine Deneuve may be greeted by the public with awe, but Balasko is embraced like an old friend. While she is known for a sometimes raucous comic persona, Balasko resides quietly in the Belleville section of Paris with her husband and two children.

"I don't live a scandalous life," Balasko said with a laugh. "I reserve that for my films."

Perhaps it is this wide-ranging appeal that allowed the actress-writer-dire ctor to tackle an unorthodox subject and score a box-office hit. Balasko's "French Twist" is a farce about a husband, a wife and the wife's lesbian lover. Balasko herself plays the cigarillo-smoking lesbian homewrecker, fleshing out the stereotype over the course of the twist-and-turn plot.

Balasko came here when the film played at the Boston Film Festival (under its original title, "Gazon Maudit"). Clad mostly in black, with her hair dyed the yellow-orange of Chee-tos, Balasko was the picture of urban panache, sipping coffee and speaking rapid-fire, Parisian-inflected French.

After a successful career of stage and screen acting in purely comic roles, Balasko caught the attention of international art-house crowds - and wowed the French critics - as the dumpy secretary who stole Gerard Depardieu away from chic wife Carole Bouquet in Bertrand Blier's 1989 "Too Beautiful for You."

She had honed her comic skills as part of Paris' legendary Equipe Splendide, an improv troupe from the cafe-theater scene that turned its satirical sketches into hit films in the late 1970s. Among the other Splendide members who rose to stardom is Michel Blanc, director-star of "Grosse Fatigue."

Creating comedy in hole-in-the-wall venues was a valuable learning experience, said Balasko. "The seats were very uncomfortable, so we really had to grab the audience's attention. That way they'd forget. It was a challenge."

After a few successful ensemble films, the Splendide members became absorbed in individual projects.

In 1985, Balasko did double duty for the first time, working both sides of the camera for "Sac de Noeuds." It's not that she had a hunger to direct, she said with a shrug - she just couldn't find directors to film her screenplays because most were busy making their own auteur projects.

So far, she has also starred in the films she has directed, including "Les Keufs," in which she's a Dirty Harriet vice cop who falls in love with a black colleague, and "My Life Is Hell," a "Faust" spoof that has her selling her soul to Daniel Auteuil's devil to become thin and beautiful.

In "French Twist," Balasko is the salty, jumpsuited Marijo, who strides into the lives of provincial couple Loli (Victoria Abril) and Laurent (Alain Chabat) when her van breaks down in front of their house. After a series of comically frank conversations between Marijo and Loli, the neglected housewife becomes intrigued with her new friend on a level that is more than platonic.

Once their passion is consummated and Laurent finds out about it, domestic warfare breaks out. As Laurent tries to win Loli back - and his mistresses and Marijo's former girlfriend become part of the mix - the farcical triangle mutates into a virtual Rubik's Cube.

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Photo Writer-director Josiane Balasko, left, stars in "French Twist" with Victoria Abril and Alain Chabat.