CANNES -- An eccentric new movie is making a monkey out of glamour girl Patricia Arquette, and she is both delighted and terrified about it.

The platinum-blond Hollywood beauty -- who made it clear before yesterday's interviews that she would tolerate no questions about her current divorce proceedings with Nicolas Cage -- is starring as an extremely hairy girl who, quite literally, goes naked and wild in Human Nature.

The movie is an oddball comic social commentary which was written and co-produced by Being John Malkovich creator Charlie Kaufman. It played at the 54th Cannes Film Festival yesterday as an official selection, out of competition and perhaps also as an off-this-planet experience.

"I'm terrified about today," Arquette admitted just before her world premiere screening at which she knew men would be grunting in horror at seeing her on screen. "I'm excited and terrified. It's like you have a scab you keep picking."

The terror that obsesses Arquette comes from being stark naked for long stretches of the movie, usually with a fuzzy coating of hair attached to her body and sometimes, because of hair-removal treatments, as her natural self. Either way, the buxom, sensuous yet shy Arquette is nervous.

"Sometimes," she says of the shoot for Michel Gondry, a French video wizard turned filmmaker, "there were hard times about it. I'm so uptight about it."

Arquette says her bubbly co-star, Welsh actor Rhys Ifans (the nutter from Notting Hill who prances about in his underwear in that movie and in his birthday suit in Human Nature), helped make her more relaxed by telling her to accept her body "because we're all born naked."

Says Ifans: "It's a lot easier being naked when there is two of you. You get an empathy for the other actor. It's quite liberating and it's every actor's hope to be emotionally naked."

As for the heavy hairyness that makes her character a genetic geek, Arquette says that is a metaphor and she learned to understand what her character (who is suffering from what the film says is a severe hormonal condition) had to deal with when her hirsute condition grosses out men.

"I sympathize, I empathize with Lila," says Arquette. "I think we all have stuff where we're different. There's a part of me that says: 'We should be whoever we are!' Why should she feel like apologizing for anything?"

Tim Robbins plays a perversely twisted scientist who lusts after Arquette in Human Nature -- after she has shed her hair. He is convinced, despite the problems selling unusual movies in the North American marketplace, that Human Nature could be an arthouse film that crosses over.

"I think we have a shot with this in America because I think the people at the distribution company (20th Century-Fox Searchlight) really do have that passion (to support the film with advertising). I know there is an audience out there for Human Nature. There is just something about it that strikes a chord in a generic public. When you realize that, then you realize that it's got a shot."


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