Hell (15) <!-- none onestar twostar threestar fourstar fivestar -->

Hell, according to Sartre, was other people. In Danis Tanovic's Hell, it's other people's husbands who are seemingly to blame, either because they have been unfaithful to their wives or else have committed an even more loathsome transgression. We get a very clear foreshadowing of the evil to come from the film's strange credit sequence, wherein a newly hatched bird succeeds after some effort in tipping another egg out of the nest to splatter on the ground below. Sibling rivalry doesn't start much earlier than that.

The pedigree of the movie is illustrious, being the second of a triptych written by Krzysztof Piesiewicz from a scenario by his collaborator Kryzysztof Kieslowski, who died in 1996. The first, Heaven (2002), was a fey and preposterous tale of love-on-the-run in which parcel-bomber Cate Blanchett and her simpatico jailer Giovanni Ribisi somehow eluded the full might of the Italian police force. Mind you, given the 43 years it took to capture that Mafia capo in Sicily, perhaps it wasn't so preposterous after all. Either way, it didn't do much to enhance Kieslowski's posthumous reputation. One hoped for better things from this, if only because Danis Tanovic's first movie was the superbly taut Bosnian war drama No Man's Land, a film that encompassed more than you'd want to know about hell on earth.

This is a very different and infinitely superior film to Heaven, though regrettably not without its own frustrations. It focuses upon three Parisian women, sisters who are no longer in contact with one another. Sophie (Emmanuelle Béart), the eldest, is married with young children and suspects her photographer husband (Jacques Gamblin) of having an affair. The youngest, Anne (Marie Gillain), is a student who's involved with her tutor, an older married man and evidently a father figure. The middle sister Céline (Karin Viard), a mousy, Brooknerish solitary, looks after their ageing mother (Carole Bouquet), who has lost her voice but, alas, none of her beady-eyed severity. The plot begins to thicken once we learn, via flashback, how the sisters' lives were clouded years before by the disgrace of their father, sent to prison on a child-abuse charge. On his release, he sought his wife's forgiveness but she, in front of her three daughters, violently rejected him.

Later, a stranger, Sébastien (Guillaume Canet), emerges from the past with a message for Céline, who in her loneliness believes him to be a suitor. It's a pardonable mistake, given the rather melodramatic way he first stalks her and then makes his introduction by reciting a poem to her in a bar. No sooner are they settled with a drink than he glances at his watch, makes his excuses (a train to catch) and leaves. At this point I felt Hell might be a daft parody of a French movie, or else one of those bourgeois-mocking comedies that Bertrand Blier used to turn out. But no, this is to be anything but a comedy, as Sébastien relates a tragic tale of guilt and misapprehension that entirely alters Céline's perspective on her late father and prompts a reunion with her estranged sisters.

Sombrely, the film seems to offer a lesson in the way families are doomed to repeat their own past: one suicide echoes another, one betrayal parallels another. But the key word here is "seems", for the burden of this family's tragedy is shown to rest not with the disgraced father but with the stern, unspeaking mother - a modern Medea who has killed, if not her children, then her children's hopes of happiness. Bouquet carries this poisoned bequest in her grim (and frightfully aged-up) features, and one looks forward to the moment when the witchy old crone will answer to her daughters for what she's done. Astonishingly, however, the confrontation is over almost before it's begun, and brings the film to a close - at the very moment it promised to get interesting.

It's impossible to think of this conclusion as anything other than a misjudgment. For however elegant its account of a family tragedy, and however intriguing the repercussions that follow, the film in retrospect looks insipid and incomplete. How else can it be when the story is only half-told? I was also aggrieved that Tanovic wasted the marvellous Quixotic presence of Jean Rochefort as an old man with a spyglass: perhaps his role fell foul of the editor's scissors, as did Maryam d'Abo's as the photographer husband's bit on the side. To pick one final hole, you could query the bizarrely inappropriate Harry Potterish score that Tanovic has co-written with the composer Dusko Segvic. With Heaven and Hell now accounted for, it is difficult to hold out any great hopes of Purgatory.