Yawn. Poorly Filmed Snooze Fest.

People are voting emotionally.

Great movie! If you want to be entertained and have a few good laughs, see this movie. The music is also very good,

Easily the biggest piece of Right wing non sense propaganda I ever saw.

In Paris, a family is victim of a tragic incident, when the patriarch is denounced by his wife of pedophilia. Years later, the three sisters have independent dysfunctional lives and never see each other. The middle sister Sophie (Emmanuelle Béart) finds that her beloved husband and photographer Pierre (Jacques Gamblin) is unfaithful and is having an affair with Julie (Maryam d'Abo) and he leaves her. When the lover discovers that Pierre has two children, she ends the affair. The youngest, Anne (Marie Gillain), is student of Sorbonne and has a crush and gets pregnant of her professor Frédéric (Jacques Perrin), who is married and father of her best friend. The oldest sister, Céline (Karin Viard), is a lonely woman that periodically travels by train to visit her handicapped dumb mother Marie (Carole Bouquet) that is trapped in a wheelchair in an asylum for elders. When the stranger Sébastien (Guillaume Canet) contacts Céline, she believes he is a shy admirer; however, after an awkward encounter, he reveals secrets from the past that will affect the relationship among the sisters."L' Enfer" is a heavy drama of sisters in love, actually doomed love, and is an analogy to the Medea Greek tragedy: Sophie loves her unfaithful husband; Anne loves her professor and father's figure; Céline is needy of love. In common, the three sisters have their lives affected in their childhood by a tragedy caused by the attitude of their mother that accused her husband of pedophilia, never listening to his explanations and giving the chance of defense. The trio of lead actresses are great actresses and extremely beautiful, and the gorgeous Carole Bouquet is unrecognizable in the role of an old and suffered woman living her personal hell. My vote is seven.Title (Brazil): "Inferno" ("Hell")

After seeing this great film on the big screen I had to think of the composer Salieri as shown in the film "Amadeus" (based on Peter Shaffer's play). There he says about the perfection of Mozart's music that it would neither be possible to take one note away nor to add one. The same applies for me to "L'enfer"/"Hell". From start to finish every detail is absolutely spot on. There was no question for me if I should buy the DVD when it came out or not. It has a special place in my collection and I show/see it only with friends who really can appreciate a good and meaningful film with depth to it.When looking at the information on this website about the writers of the film I can see why often giving credits to the writing can be problematic. As the DVD has as an extra background information and clips about the making of L'enfer I seem to remember from it that the fantastic director had a lot of input into it. At least one of the main actresses commented that he actually recreated the script and made it his own. Though he might not have done this in written form his handwriting is all over the end-product. This, and also in many other ways as you can find out when you watch the DVD extras yourself, makes it such a beautiful "round" piece of art.Art is done by artists, and therefore great art is created by great artists. This director belongs definitely to the latter. He didn't even attempt to make it a "Kieszlowski film". Much better, he made it absolutely his own. Kieszlowski would have been proud of it (what, on the other hand, I unfortunately can't say at all about the "prequel" Heaven by my fellow country-man Tom Tykwer). For me it is therefore also the best memorial for that great and important Polish director who died so prematurely.

I'd like to begin by saying that while this film undoubtedly shows the talents of its actual director, for the sake of this commentary I will assume it is a movie by Krysztof Kieslowski. I suppose this movie needs to be viewed together with Tom Tykwer's "Heaven" (2002) in order to be understood from a broader perspective (I don't think anyone has directed "Purgatory" yet, the third part of the trilogy suggested by Kieslowski). Another important source for understanding the film is perhaps Dante's "La Divina Commedia", since this is what inspired Kieslowski in the first place.What the film does, I think, is to offer the viewer a set of disturbing stories, from the very first opening sequence of the bird hatching and pushing the other eggs out of the nest; All these stories, right to the end of the film, never reach any satisfactory resolution. Character's lives are simply damaged or destroyed by events based on misunderstanding or ignorance, as well as human fallibility. Perhaps this is what makes for the film's theme of "Hell". If this is so, and here I can only guess at what Kieslowski's original intentions might have been, then "L'Enfer" is a very modern film in it's representation of hell as the presence of unresolved, arbitrary trauma in human life - hence perhaps the professor's speech about destiny and coincidence is of central significance in understanding the movie. This may in fact be the question the movie is supposed to put to its audience: is life a matter of destiny, or is it just coincidence? This film therefore shares with all other works directed or inspired by Kieslowski that director's strengths, as well as his weaknesses. Kieslowski had a genius for translating transcendent concepts into immanent imagery, and showing the viewer the place where eternity and time coincide; "La Double Vie de Veronique" may be the best example of this. However, that same Polish genius tended to skim lightly over the harsher, more troubling aspects of human tragedy - I would have liked to have seen him attempt a movie about the holocaust, or the life of Job, because I think shadow, while not entirely missing, is nevertheless a little too stylised in his films. Evil is unfortunately real, and while there may be light at the end of every tunnel, the way there gets very dark indeed. A great filmmaker has a responsibility to show this, especially when dealing with universal themes. Hell is not a place that has the good looks of Emanuelle Beart (funnily enough, this actress also starred in a 1994 movie with the same title)! Overall, a movie worth watching.

I caught it at the IFC theater in the spring. I liked it a lot and of the problems I had with it, they were minor stylistic choices mostly to do with the music (I thought it intruded on a few of the scenes). As with all Kieslowski scripts, L'ENFER is very smart and uncompromising yet not sterile; in fact, it is a very humanist work.It never hurts to have beautiful French women in beautiful Paris, either. Emmanuelle Beart is one of those typical fantasy French sexpots all men drool over but with plenty of acting chops to go along with her stunning good looks. However, I don't really like Nathalie Baye and she had the toughest dialogue to sell, so the fact that I wasn't completely out of the picture at that point must mean she deserves some credit.Tanovic is a little too showy a director sometimes but he captures a lot of the details very well: the husband lowering Beart to the floor, Beart hitting her head on the dresser, the mother's handwriting & bitter eyes, etc.Glad they kept this trilogy alive. I hope we get too see "Purgatory".