Karin Albou’s timely “La Petite Jerusalem,” which unfolds at an almost excessively languid pace, examines how the Jewish and Muslim communities in a small Parisian town are forced by poverty and fate to stand exposed to one another in this tense microcosm of the situation in the Middle East.

Set in a French suburban community of Jewish immigrants from North Africa, “La Petite Jerusalem” centers on Laura (Fanny Valette), a student living with her mother and her sister’s family in a cramped apartment. She embraces Kantian philosophy while resisting the orthodoxy of her surroundings and attempts grand gestures of self-control. Her growing attraction to an Algerian Muslim co-worker, a former journalist, causes in her an internal conflagration of personal and learned ideas and loyalties.

Feverishly intellectual and romantic, Laura doggedly sublimates the latter feeling into the former until her attraction to the co-worker, Djamel (Hedi Tillette de Clermont-Tonnerre), becomes too much to bear. The scenes in which the two change back-to-back into their janitors’ uniforms in a school locker room effectively illustrate the indignities of immigrant life; these modest people are forced to pretend that they are not taking off their clothes in the same room. A similar vulnerability afflicts the members and institutions of the Orthodox Jewish community in the film, which is endangered by a threat that builds through several incidents in the story (based on real events in the suburb of Sarcelles).

Ms. Valette has a doll-like beauty but lacks the strength the role demands. Laura’s dull sister Mathilde (Elsa Zylberstein) is more interesting.

Ms. Zylberstein is unusually restrained in her slow-blooming performance as the older sister, whose religious scruples have crippled her sex life with her husband. Mathilde’s plight is a tragicomic one; she doggedly asks questions of a wise woman at the mikvah and of her own mother to fill the void in her own education. She’s like Eve Ensler in a sheydl, and Ms. Zylberstein is so touching that we temporarily forget to wonder why this idea has been bundled into the story.

Ms. Albou is concerned with the way her characters use systems to understand their own lives. She ambitiously takes on several kinds of belief – traditional religion (Judaism and Islam), philosophy, mysticism, superstition – with mixed results. Her vision of the intersection of religious and secular life in a drab Parisian suburb is unique; some beautiful camerawork captures the contrast of ancient rituals with bleak housing projects. The touchy subject matter is handled delicately, with a few exceptions; for example, an adulterous husband becomes the victim of a hate crime in what seems intended as a comeuppance. In the film’s tentative, anxious resolution, Ms. Albou may be telling us that religious traditionalists can only achieve personal fulfillment in their own isolation, while it is the responsibility of moderates to heal ancient divisions.