This is a very sensitive film adaptation of the novel by Jennifer Egan of a younger sister's haunting search for her lost older sister, who is supposed to have committed suicide for unknown reasons some years before. Much of the film is shown in flashbacks, where the older sister is played by Cameron Diaz. Diaz creates a wild, carefree, idealistic character who was typical of the 1960s, a radical flower-child who wants to change the world. The other sister, who was six years younger, is played by Jordana Brewster. She lives in America, and the story commences in the 1970s when Brewster is old enough to want to set out for Europe on her own to seek the answers to Diaz's mysterious death in Portugal. Brewster is a quiet, introspective girl, who is obsessed by discovering the truth about Diaz, a task made all the more urgent in that she is haunted also by the death of their father when they were young, and the consequent feelings of loss and abandonment. The mother is sympathetically played, with a kind of desperate suppressed emotion, by Blythe Danner, who can always be relied upon to provide an element of gravitas to any story. Brewster leaves suddenly for Europe, using savings left to her by her father, and follows the trail of the postcards sent to her by Diaz. She begins in Amsterdam but gets nowhere, so she goes to France and in Paris she finds her sister's old boyfriend, played by Christopher Eccleston. She had known him in America, and he and Diaz had left for Europe together, but Eccleston had never come back. On the one hand he is glad to see her, but it is clear that he is also deeply disturbed and upset at her visit. He is living in a large flat with a French woman and says he has put the past behind him. He claims that he never saw Diaz again after July, 1987, when she left him to go to Berlin. He invites Brewster to stay in his flat and when he is out, she discovers old photos of her sister in a drawer, and one bears the date on the back of August, 1987. So she confronts him and he admits he lied, that he had in fact really gone to Berlin with her. Later in the story, he admits that he lied again, and that he had known Diaz much longer even than that. Diaz had been attracted to radical causes in a naïve way. In Berlin she was able briefly to join the Red Brigades, a terrorist group. But when they discovered how feather-headed she was, they sent her out to buy some newspapers, and when she returned, their squat had been totally vacated and they had vanished. This was their clever way of dumping her so that she would never be able to trace them. She feels well and truly 'dumped' and joins another, less deadly terrorist group. But that affiliation too does not prosper because she ends up detonating a terrorist bomb which kills an innocent man, leaving a widow with several children behind. This suddenly wakes her up from her naïve revolutionary fantasies, so she goes off the Portugal to try to get herself together. The film has some inept patches, such as a purposeless sequence where the younger sister, who has been given some LSD by a stranger, takes the pill and has a bad 'trip' while riding a tourist boat on the Seine. This gives an excuse for psychedelic camera angles and so forth, but it does not move the story forward at all and should have been cut from the script. Despite rambling a bit, the film does retain the mystery right through to the end, where surprising things are revealed in Portugal. The film is not just a mystery story or a thriller, but has some significant lessons to impart, and shows a humanity and a concern for the characters which is often lacking in more one-dimensional thriller stories. It is also an interesting insight into attitudes of what has now become a historical epoch, though to those of us who experienced it personally, it all seems as if everything happened just the other day, or even just a few minutes ago, so vivid were those times and the people and events then.
Review of The Invisible Circus
