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ETERNAL SUNSHINE OF A SPOTLESS MIND (2004) by Michel Gondry
This is a stunningly beautiful love story.
The film is very complex as it probes into our very minds to figure out WHY we love the people we love and how our memories DEFINE who we are. Joel wakes up one day and decides not to go to work. He meets a beautiful, wacky woman named Clementine at the beach. We don't know it at the time, but all else that follows is a flashback to a break-up of this very relationship. When we return to the "present" time, we find Joel and Clementine refind each other, but now have the knowledge that they were together and "hear" the very things that start to drive each other crazy about each other BEFORE they start the relationship. They learn what is going to make them break up.
This is hardly a normal Jim Carrey movie. The writer, Charlie Kaufman, deals with how our brains dictate everything we know, feel and sense. The brain manipulates us and we have to live our lives BELIEVING what our brain tells us to believe, but WHY do we trust our perceptions at all????
Consider all the striking scenes in the film. This film takes us into Joel's past memories and into the heart of his unconscious as he tries to seek out and "hide" Clementine once he decides in the middle of the memory erasing procedure to halt it, but can't. We see scenes of Joel's childhood which help explain the man he has become. We can now see the reasons he fell for Clementine in the first place.
This movie is about love and how vague and nebulous it is. Why do we love whom we love? How is the film VISUALLY representitve of Memory and HOW WE INTEGRATE IT INTO OUR LIFE. Describe certain sequences and WHY they are depicted that way. |