HELL HATH NO FURRY LIKE A WOMAN SHORN.

Byline: Bob Strauss Film Critic

EVEN THE MOST innovative writers create stuff that should never be removed from their desk drawer.

So it is with Charlie Kaufman, whose screenplay for ``Being John Malkovich'' pioneered new horizons of psychologically trenchant, original absurdity, and whose script for the current ``Human Nature'' can't even figure out how to exploit the burlesque possibilities of unwanted body hair.

Certainly, the tone set by director Michel Gondry, a Frenchman known for his interesting Bjork music videos, is a huge factor in Kaufman's first feature film's failure. Encouraging his actors to play the snide material in a key of contrived innocent arrested development, Gondry makes the whole thing feel like more of a prank than a motion picture.

But the film's fundamental flaws lay in its writing. Smug and lacking in invention, it's just the opposite of ``Malkovich's'' enthralling mixture of behavioral acuity and brilliantly bizarre plotting. Think of a whole movie built around the Cameron Diaz character's issues in the other film, and you've got this one's jumping-off point. From there, it all goes splat.

Patricia Arquette's Lila Jute is a troubled young woman, due to the abnormally furry epidermis she's contended with since puberty. During a long self-exile in the woods, she becomes a best-selling nature writer, which should be enough of a riposte to the follicle-phobes of the world. But, darn it, Lila needs love, and with the help of a friendly electrologist, Louise (Rosie Perez), she's introduced to Nathan Bronfman (Tim Robbins).

A sexually repressed scientist whose goal in life is to teach lab mice proper table manners, fastidious Nathan is as desperate for female approval as Lila is for male affection. Such a straitlaced prig would, of course, be repulsed by errant hair, but Louise's attention and a lot of surreptitious shaving sessions keep the stubbly truth from him long enough for love to bloom.

One day, while hiking in her old stomping grounds, Lila and Nathan encounter a feral man (Rhys Ifans) who was raised in the trees from infancy by a father who thought he was an ape. Relocated to a plexiglass cell in Nathan's lab and dubbed Puff, the wild fellow is gradually civilized with the aid of an electroshock collar and Nathan's flirty, fake French assistant Gabrielle (Miranda Otto). As Puff becomes more erudite, the two scientists grow closer to each other and Lila feels more and more like she's betraying herself and her ideals to cling onto Nathan's fading love.

Meanwhile, no matter how far Puff develops intellectually, all he can really think about is jumping any female that comes within pheromone range.

Not quite the conceptual coup of crawling inside a snooty actor's head, is it? ``Human's'' nature-vs.-nurture premise is banal, and its thesis that we're all just horny little monkeys at heart rarely rises above the smirk level of development here. And if you want to see a movie that intelligently explores the intersection of overweening intellectualism and repressed libido, the French-Austrian import ``The Piano Teacher,'' also opening today, is where you want to go.

This one offers some agreeable slap-and-tickle and an impressive hirsute body suit created by Tony Gardner. But even though we've only seen one other movie Kaufman's written, we understandably expect much more than that from anything with his name on it.

HUMAN NATURE - Two stars

(Rated R: violence, nudity, sex, language, body hair)

Starring: Tim Robbins, Patricia Arquette, Rhys Ifans, Miranda Otto, Rosie Perez.

Director: Michel Gondry.

Running time: 1 hr. 36 min.

Playing: Selected theaters.

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Rhys Ifans tries to persuade Patricia Arquette to take a walk on the wild side in ``Human Nature,'' a film undone by smugness.