Director-writer Karin Albou’s first full-length feature, La petite Jérusalem (Little Jerusalem), treats from the inside, as it were, a seldom considered, intriguing aspect of modern Judaism but fails to deliver the potential goods. After Cannes last year, it premieres at the Film Society of Lincoln Center and Jewish Museum’s co-sponsored New York Jewish Film Festival prior to a January 27 release.

The French-born daughter of an Algerian immigrant father developed her script as a variation on eighteenth-century philosopher Immanuel Kant’s God and freedom, outwardly received vs. inwardly perceived moral law, embodied in two sisters of a Tunisian Jewish family in Sarcelles, a north Paris suburb of clean but monotonous low-income housing blocks nicknamed “La Petite Jerusalem.” The siblings’ desires and lives, however, offer a too convenient division, objectified in the excessive repetition of action and symbols like Laura’s nightly walks or the module façades, while certain lapses remain incongruous, such as the cramped, unisex, religiously mixed school locker where the young Orthodox woman changes clothes.

That woman is Laura (Fanny Valette), a conscientious university student who would back away from both religious law and insistent libido into what she thinks is the Kantian realm of Pure Reason. Her face stays off-camera in the opening shot, but the sensuousness of hair and legs over which rough stockings are pulled, give the lie to this pose of chaste intellect. Contrasted, but sympathetic to her and to the audience, is older sister Mathilde (Elsa Zylberstein), whose hair remains hidden under a covering or, outdoors, a severe wig. This sister’s husband Ariel (Bruno Todeschini) is rigorous, distant and dissatisfied, because Mathilde believes that Orthodoxy forbids her enjoyment of and full participation in conjugal coupling. Their four young children complete the household, along with the sisters’ obese Tunisian mother (Sonia Tahar), lost in superstitions and lamenting her own husband.

Laura’s good-humored professor (François Marthouret) blatantly poses Albou’s central question, whether freedom comes from the law, or in violating it, and christens his student the “Obedient One” for responding that liberty resides, rather, in adherence to self-imposed limits and ritual (like a seven o’clock Kantian walk).

Separately but also sharing, both women learn to bend, Mathilde through the shrink-like advice of an unnamed starkly girl-with-a-pearl-earring-looking attendant (Aurore Clément) at her mikveh, or ritual menstrual bath. Ariel has been unfaithful out of respect for her modesty, he says, which left the darkly handsome man frustrated sexually, and so the wife must understand that far from being religiously taboo, marital pleasure is mutual and encouraged.

On the other hand, self-proclaimed free spirit unmarried Laura finds temptation outside the religion, in the person of Djamel (Hedi Tillette de Clermont-Tonnerre). Still illegally in the country, the Muslim works alongside her as a school janitor, having fled Algeria when extremists threatened his career as a liberal journalist -- is his briefly seen abdominal scar the mark of more than mere threats?

In line with her determination to live for the mind and deny the flesh, Laura coolly rejects a pleasant coreligionist suitor in Eric (Michaël Cohen) but falls for the Arab, although in a gratuitous scene his aunt and uncle (Saïda Bekkouche and Salah Teskouk) object to her even more than her family to him. Made timely by recent telltale events in France, such religious, ethnic and nationalistic considerations are not developed and thus would better have been left out entirely; in point of fact, they are muddied instead of dealt with by briefer-than-brief incidents that are introduced and dropped: arson at the synagogue, an attack during a soccer match, and the passing mention of irregular immigration papers.

In the end, and not uncommon to youth’s propensity to assault Great Themes with inadequate weaponry, La petite Jérusalem defeats itself. Is a person to find fulfillment in the laws of Ha-Shem (“the Name,” i.e., God) or in the dictates of human drives and passions, or possibly in a balance of the two? Open-ended, in the director-writer’s terms, asking rather than neatly answering, it invokes more than it can deal with. Of course the future in any story is “open” -- what happens to them in five, ten, twenty years? -- but this film closes tightly enough. Just unsatisfactorily so.

(Released by Kino International; not rated by MPAA.)