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The Invisible Circus

2001, Movie, R, 98 mins

The Invisible Circus: Review

INVISIBLE CIRCUS, THE
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A young woman goes in search of a ghost and finds herself in this trite tale of two sisters and the legacy of the sixties. Summer, 1969: Faith O'Connor (Cameron Diaz), a young radical, and her English boyfriend Wolf (Christopher Eccleston) take off for Europe, full of the spirit of positive change that characterized the best of that decade. But Faith's daily postcards to younger sister Phoebe (Jordana Brewster) soon stop, and the next Phoebe hears of Faith, her body has been found at the bottom of a cliff outside a tiny Portuguese fishing village. Seven years later, Phoebe, a haunted, introverted teenager, still can't accept that her courageous big sister could have taken her own life. Against the wishes of her understandably protective mother (Blythe Danner), Phoebe decides to retrace Faith's journey across Europe, using the postcards she received that fateful summer as breadcrumbs. From a houseboat in Amsterdam to a flat in Paris, where she finds Wolf married and settled into a life of bourgeois complacency, to the edge of a steep Portuguese cliff, Phoebe follows Faith's footsteps right to the end, hoping to lay her ghost to rest. In adapting Jennifer Egan's first novel, writer-turned-director Adam Brooks has mined just about every sixties cliché imaginable; his film is no more evocative of that brief time of hope than The Wonder Years, and contents itself with cornier symbolism and a cheap resolution. That said, Faith's story is another matter entirely. Told by Wolf in flashback and harshly filmed in chilly blues, it's a surprisingly involving story of idealism going sour as Faith takes a headlong tumble into the darkest reaches of the radical underground. It's a far more interesting film; unfortunately, it's locked inside a maudlin coming-of-age story that barely registers. leave a comment --Ken Fox
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