MCANUFF STAGES A SCREEN CAREER; BALZAC NOVEL AN AUSPICIOUS FIRST VEHICLE.

Byline: Reed Johnson Daily News Staff Writer

Whoever said ``all the world's a stage'' must've never worked in Hollywood. Otherwise, he'd know that the motion picture industry generally treats the theater world like some highfalutin but impoverished relative who's always begging for a handout.

Des McAnuff spent half a lifetime in that world before making the leap to movies three years ago. He had thrived there, too: During his 11-year term as artistic director of the La Jolla Playhouse (1983-94), the theater snagged more than 200 awards, including the 1993 Tony Award for outstanding regional theater. His 1985 Broadway staging of ``Big River'' won seven Tony Awards, and he picked up his second Best Director Tony in 1993 for his dazzling, pop art-inspired production of ``The Who's Tommy.''

Now, the Toronto-born director is launching what he hopes will be a new career as a big-screen auteur with Fox Searchlight's ``Cousin Bette.'' His debut is a lushly intelligent adaptation of Honore de Balzac's deliciously nasty 1846 novel about a scheming Paris spinster who wreaks death and ruin on the relatives and friends who've betrayed and abused her.

Jessica Lange stars as Balzac's embittered yet sympathetic heroine, a kind of female Iago trapped in a self-made theater of cruelty. The two-time Oscar-winning actress didn't hesitate when offered the chance to play a character she'd fallen in love with in her early 20s - part of a lifelong infatuation, she says, with big, fat European novels.

``I couldn't say exactly what it was about the book that I loved when I read it, but I do remember it was one of those books where I just hated to come to the end of it,'' says Lange, during a recent interview at the Four Seasons Hotel in Los Angeles.

``It's a great escape, a leisure thing for me, 19th-century novels. And for the longest time the French were my favorite. I never enjoyed the English as much as I did the French. I think the French were just a little juicier.''

The pitch-black comedy has everything Jackie Collins fans could want: revenge, greed, bitchiness, wanton lust, gorgeous costumes and numerous revealing glimpses of Elisabeth Shue, who plays a heartlessly seductive burlesque performer named Jenny Cadine (actually a composite of three characters from the novel).

Rather like Joel Grey's leering Master of Ceremonies in the Broadway musical ``Cabaret,'' Shue's Jenny functions as a solo Greek chorus, offering saucy asides on the main plot line. Her domain is the Theatre de Varieties, a rowdy Paris music hall specializing in raunchy vignettes that mock France's moral and social chaos on the eve of the 1848 revolution. Jenny also becomes Bette's partner in crime, using her curves and creamy white complexion the way Bette uses cunning intelligence to ensnare her victims.

McAnuff says the spectacular theater sequences, which form a sort of play-within-the-play, were conceived and embellished by screenwriters Lynn Siefert and Susan Tarr, also the film's co-executive producers. He believes they add a wittily corrosive dimension to Bette's appalling - and appallingly funny - quest for vengeance.

``While the theater's very much a presence in the novel, Balzac - because there's no need to do it - doesn't really get into any description of specific songs or scenes,'' says McAnuff, 45. ``But I think they (Siefert and Tarr) saw, and I saw, a nice opportunity there. And I think what's important about the theater in the novel is that ... it's a metaphor for manipulation and illusion and deception.

``And so we very much tried to shoot it that way. Bette at one point appears almost like a puppeteer above the stage, and you can see her kind of drawing on this and perhaps absorbing the stagecraft and the conceits. And also I think Balzac was playing with these various theatrical genres, and switching back and forth from farce and satire and melodrama and even tragedy.''

McAnuff emphasizes, however, that he didn't intend to make a movie that takes place partially in a theater. It just worked out that way.

``I actually pushed that somewhat further than maybe they (the screenwriters) had intended, and not because I'm a stage director. Because in a sense it was kind of the last thing I wanted to do with my first film, was to spend time in a theater. It was exactly what I was trying to get away from. But it did seem important to create a sense of theatricality so that we would have a right to go through those (genre) shifts.''

A hybrid sensibility

Lange says McAnuff's hybrid sensibility was an asset in carving up a portly (450-page) slab of literature like ``Cousin Bette.'' So were his many years of working one on one with actors.

``He knew this piece very well and was extremely passionate about it, coupled with extraordinary energy,'' says the 48-year-old actress.

``He knew what he was doing. He was prepared, he rehearsed, he really believed in the rehearsal process. I had a great time working with him. I never felt like he wasn't getting it. Now, that's not saying that you're in agreement on every aspect of his interpretation, but he knew what he wanted and knew how to get it. And that says a lot, I think, for a first-time film director.''

McAnuff admits there was a certain perversity in casting ``one of the great beauties of our time'' as a dowager. For most of the film, Lange appears in a drab, dun-colored frock and an oiled wig - a far cry from the high-cheekboned, Nordic goddess glories of ``Country,'' and closer to the ravaged persona of ``Frances.''

By casting against physical type, the movie underscores the basic artificiality of 19th-century concepts of beauty, which utterly devalued women of a certain age if they lacked husbands and cash flow, McAnuff says.

The filmmakers also saw Lange as one of the few actresses capable of projecting both rock-ribbed determination and tragic, love-starved vulnerability.

``Jessica was the actress that we wanted, not just me, but Fox Searchlight, too,'' says McAnuff. ``The most important reason is that there aren't that many actresses out there who have that kind of ability, simply.

``The other thing was, I felt, having seen her in other films, I knew that she was a real changeling, that she had the ability to kind of transform herself and wasn't all that concerned about - certainly I shouldn't say she's not concerned about self-image - but that she's a very serious actress and she puts the acting first.''

Is it harder to play a repressed woman brimming with heartbroken rage than one who lets her emotions all hang out?

``I think it's harder, for me at least it is,'' Lange replies, ``because it's very easy for me to play those kind of big emotional sweeps. This is calibrated much more specifically. ... I was so limited in what I could reveal, and how I could reveal it, that I had to be very specific to make sure that the audience understood.''

McAnuff, known at La Jolla for patronizing offbeat theater artists like iconoclastic director Peter Sellars and New Vaudevillian Bill Irwin, mourns the disappearance of great, villainous screen roles for middle-age women.

``We don't get to know many people like Bette in the cinema. I think there was a time when it might've been a little more common,'' he observes.

``Somebody mentioned that it's the kind of role that Bette Davis would've loved to play. I think in some ways that roles fall out of fashion. I think we may be less interested, in this day and age, in that class of character, too. I think it's become less common than in the days of `Hush ... Hush, Sweet Charlotte' and `What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?' when we celebrated great actresses as they got more senior.''

`Insane journey'

Besides taking us on what he calls ``this kind of insane journey,'' McAnuff hopes the film's depiction of Paris in the 1840s will suggest parallels with America in the 1990s. In Bette's time, the French imperial aristocracy - a faux nobility created by the spoils of Napoleonic wars - had been resting on its laurels for 40 years. It had mortgaged its future and slipped into pleasure-seeking idleness while poverty and discontent seethed in the Paris streets.

The uprising of 1848 became one of many aftershocks that struck France following the Revolution of 1789. Like Anton Chekhov, whose plays 70 years later would eerily foreshadow the Russian Revolution, Balzac seemed to predict the coming storm.

Lang compares ``Cousin Bette's'' milieu with that of ``Cabaret'' - ``a period of time where it was just kind of wanton, self-indulgent, pleasure-oriented, whatever they could do, you know - sex, drugs, rock 'n' roll.

``If you look at periods like that in history, like 1848 before the February revolution, and then Berlin right before the advent of the Third Reich, it seems to spin out and spin out and spin out, until finally it's kind of like, boom! And all that has to come to an end. And we seem to be spinning out. Who knows what's up ahead? But I wouldn't say we're on the right path, you know?''

In the end, though, it's impossible not to laugh along with Balzac's bitter human comedy - even if the joke's on us.

``I think it's rare to see something that's truly insightful without having a certain amount of distance,'' McAnuff says. ``I think what it proves is that these works are universal. When you can take something and apply it to your own time, I guess it says something about the remarkable mind that created it.''

CAPTION(S):

2 Photos

Photo: (1--Cover--Color) Can Jessica Lange play a vengeful woman?

`Bette' on it

(2) ``I was so limited in what I could reveal, and how I could reveal it, that I had to be very specific to make sure that the audience understood,'' says Jessica Lange of her work in the title role of Des McAnuff's ``Cousin Bette.''