Trying Hollywood, just for laughs

It's odd to see Juliette Binoche, the great French star, stomping away on a treadmill, breathing heavily, even, yikes, sweating in a distinctly un-Gallic fashion. It's not that French women shouldn't exercise, but Binoche is best known for the ethereal innocence with which she has infused such films as "The Unbearable Lightness of Being" and "The English Patient," as well as perhaps her greatest performance, as the widow in Krzysztof Kieslowski's "Three Colors: Blue" steadfastly trying to bury herself in anomie.

Yet there she is in the new comedy "Dan in Real Life," puffing away as she works out, her dark locks matted with sweat, one of a million American women marching along the electronic walkway on the journey toward thinness. In the comedy from writer-director Peter Hedges, funnyman Steve Carell plays a widower who inadvertently falls for his brother's girlfriend (Binoche) during a long weekend with his extended family. Considering how well she's known in the rest of the world, Binoche has appeared in relatively few American movies, having famously turned down Steven Spielberg's offer to star in "Jurassic Park" to make "Blue."

Indeed, this brief stop in Hollywood comes smack in the middle of a global tour of filmmaking. In the last year, she's gone to the Negev desert to shoot Israeli director Amos Gitai's film "Disengagement," Argentina for "Another Kind of Silence," made several French films and appeared in Taiwanese director Hsiao-hsien Hou's "Flight of the Red Balloon," as well as Japanese director Nobuhiro Suwa's segment of the anthology film "Paris, Je t'aime." There are plans afoot to make "The Certified Copy" with Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami, which delves into the philosophical question, "What is more true, the original or the copy?"; she recently visited the arts community in Tehran.

She's only come to Los Angeles to publicize "Dan in Real Life" (opening Oct. 26), and she seems slightly dismayed by the questions hurled at her here. Entertainment reporters asked "if I'm frightened of age; if I'm frightened of not getting parts; if I'm frightened . . . the kind of questions that put you in a depression after a while, because it's, like, so narrow-minded," she says with a grimace over tea in the restaurant of her hotel. "I felt like, wow, it must be something to live here and being in the American system of making movies."