CAN'T SEE POINT OF 'CIRCUS'.

Byline: Bob Strauss Film Critic

``The Invisible Circus'' has serious statements to make about sisterhood and political commitment and wandering around Europe and all that big stuff. It just doesn't quite know what those statements are, so it ends up looking pretty and dithering.

The same qualities could be used to describe the film's heroines, a pair of resemblance-challenged siblings played by Cameron Diaz and Jordana Brewster. Diaz is the older one, Faith, a full-bloom Berkeley flower child who decamped to Paris in the late '60s and jumped off a Portuguese cliff in 1971. Six years later, her adoring and still distraught teenage sister Phoebe (talented soap star Jordana Brewster) heads for the Continent to find out exactly why the ethereal, life-loving Faith committed suicide.

This proves both easier and harder than Phoebe anticipates. Faith's old hippie boyfriend Wolf (Christopher Eccleston), now a short-haired bourgeois with a snippy French wife, knows all the details of the downward spiral but is maddeningly stingy about letting Phoebe in on them. As the young woman pries more and more information out of him, he attributes his reticence to promises he swore to keep Faith's long-gone secrets.

But when Phoebe and Wolf end up taking a slow, languid journey to the scene of death, his exploitation of the young woman's vulnerability, while consciously uncalculated, proves skin-crawling nonetheless. Ripe and lovely as Miss Brewster is, you can't help but wish that she'd revealed her charms in some dumb campus comedy rather than under these more serious and far more smarmy conditions.

As for the dolorously doled-out particulars of Faith's story, they add up to a not-unconvincing tale of radical idealism gone terribly, violently wrong. Director Adam Brooks (``Almost You''), who adapted Jennifer Egan's novel for the screen, does better with Diaz in these inherently more dramatic flashback sequences than he does with Phoebe's story. But character development goes at a frustrating, start-and-stop pace in both.

Yes, when you're young, you don't necessarily learn experience's lessons either properly nor the first time around. But when you're old enough to write books or screenplays about the subject, you should at least be able to turn the raw material of youthful confusion into strong, clear patterns. ``The Invisible Circus'' remains true to its title, difficult to see the point of or enjoy.

``THE INVISIBLE CIRCUS''

(Rated R: sex, nudity, drug use, language, violence)

The stars: Jordana Brewster, Christopher Eccleston, Cameron Diaz, Blythe Danner.

Behind the scenes: Written and directed by Adam Brooks, based on Jennifer Egan's book. Produced by Julia Chasman and Nick Wechsler. Released by Fine Line Features.

Running time: One hour, 38 minutes.

Playing: Selected theaters.

Our rating: Two stars

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Jordana Brewster is a young girl struggling to understand her big sister's suicide in ``The Invisible Circus.''