As if responding to an overwhelming sense of cultural, historical, or personal amnesia, American filmmakers have lately made the memory bank the main concept of their work, constructing inventive, hallucinatory cinematic labyrinths so as to freshly navigate through the ever-mysterious cognitive process. The notable entries in this cinematic corpus have often been gloomy, fatalistic neo-noir tales of perception and recollection, as in David Lynch’s masterpiece Mulholland Drive and Christopher Nolan’s Memento. Both films are haunted by paranoia and death, relating the loss of memory to a loss of life as well as control. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, the second collaboration between screenwriter Charlie Kaufman and director Michel Gondry, chooses a different tone. Combining modern romantic comedy and garage-junk science fiction, Kaufman and Gondry have created one of the most touching and bittersweet ruminations on the follies of love and mnemonics ever put on film.

Jim Carrey, in his first success at a serious role, plays Joel Barish, a sad-sack nobody who one day, on a whim, skips work to travel out to Montauk. There he meets and falls in love with Clementine, a blue-haired, orange-sweatered manic, charmingly interpreted by Kate Winslet. Flash-forward many months later and Joel is heartbroken over the collapse of their relationship, and even more so by the fact that Clementine has gone through with a memory-erasing procedure by Lacuna Inc. to literally get him out of her head. A desperate Joel decides to do the same, and from this point on the narrative snaps and unspools like a torrent of remembered incidents long repressed: the hilariously unprofessional Lacuna team members (played by Mark Ruffalo, Kirsten Dunst, Elijah Wood, and Tom Wilkinson) operate on Joel and take advantage of the technology for their own romantic purposes, while Joel, realizing he’s inside his own mind, journeys backward through his memories of Clementine, eventually accepting the joy of what they had together and attempting to hide their relationship within “off the map” traumas and childhood experiences so that it won’t be completely erased. Identities are stolen, memories are jumbled, and people hopelessly repeat mistakes in love.

Charlie Kaufman’s scripts have two themes at their core: the curse/gift of consciousness, and the loneliness of the human condition. Being John Malkovich explored fame and the longing to be someone else, to escape the entrapment of one’s own limitations as well as the inevitability of mortality; Adaptation employed metacinematics to gauge the difficulty of the artistic process and connections between people. Eternal Sunshine recalls Malkovich in that it also “concretizes” the workings of the mind onscreen, but its existential inquiries are softly melancholic rather than mentally and sexually frustrating. The playful but unsatisfying Adaptation, in which Kaufman portrays himself going through writer’s block, might have actually allowed the writer to conquer any remaining creative insecurities—Eternal Sunshine displays the courage of an artist unafraid of plunging headlong into emotion instead of falling back on self-parody, and the film’s wit and subtle characterizations flesh out an idea that might have been, in the hands of a lesser talent, merely novel.

Borges once suggested that “A man’s memory is not a summation; it is a chaos of vague possibilities.” Gondry, well-known for his direction of innovative music videos for Björk and The White Stripes, deftly uses a plethora of low-tech cinematic tricks to render this point, as contained within Kaufman’s script, immediately palpable. Superimpositions, shallow-focus, digital effects, dyschronous and overlapping sound, combinatory mise-en-scene, and washed-out compositions all form a gorgeous palette evoking the evaporations and blurrings of consciousness. Wintry landscapes—a snowy beach, a frozen lake—provide solemn backdrops for Joel and Clementine’s wanderings; sun-spotted interiors capture the happiness of a day spent in bed with one’s lover, as well as the spatial disorientation of crawling under a table as an infant. Each visual idea challenges the eye and the intellect, and the film as a whole forges a new cinematic vocabulary in its unique representation of perception.

Actually, the film that Eternal Sunshine most suggests is Hollis Frampton’s structuralist classic nostalgia. In that 1971 avant-garde piece, Frampton serially burns a dozen of his own photographs (and one found photo) while Frampton’s off-screen narration relates the story behind their creation. However, each accompanying tale is about the photograph that will succeed the one currently shown. Nostalgia develops out of the film’s simple but effective structure: memory in the form of captured light disintegrates in front of our eyes while we experience another reminiscence aurally; when the next photograph is destroyed by flame we recall its story from the previous sequence only to have another memory simultaneously told to us. This jarring tension between past, present, and future—in which the consuming quality of time is brilliantly heightened—similarly infuses Eternal Sunshine. Like Frampton, Gondry enacts mutations on filmic material in order to disrupt linear narrative and foreground, as Rachel O. Moore has written about nostalgia, “[t]he impossibility of satisfying . . . desire, of fixing a moment in time, maintaining its vitality, while living in yet another moment.” Joel’s memories spring to life only to be almost immediately blotted out, while the jumbled trajectory of the erasing process constellates the romantic past and the damaged future—every wonderful moment between Joel and Clementine (“you are lost and gone forever”) in the beginning stages of their relationship sighs with an achingly sad evanescence. The most poignant comes when Joel relives the first encounter with Clementine and his regret of departing too soon. Even in memory the past can’t be sufficiently altered—Joel’s only willful addition is a completed goodbye.

The present, meanwhile, establishes an absurd specter over both past and future. Patrick (Wood) revives and reclaims Joel’s identity, exploiting his now-forgotten romantic tics to seduce the Joel-out-of-mind Clementine, and Mary (Dunst) starts playing out the same scenario with Dr. Mierzwiak (Wilkinson) that she once had removed from her cortex. Through the irony of this last subplot Kaufman shows that the yearnings of love repeatedly, stubbornly topple the logic of the mind and even the “spotlessness” of an erased memory. Appropriately, Mary speaks the Alexander Pope quotation that supplies the film with its perfect title: “How happy is the blameless Vestal’s lot!/The world forgetting, by the world forgot/Eternal sun-shine of the spotless mind!/Each pray’r accepted, and each wish resign’d.”

At Eternal Sunshine’s finale prayers are accepted and wishes resigned, in a circular structure that has more to do with the recurrences of Nietzsche than the dramatics of Tarantino. It acts as an answer to Malkovich’s disturbing denouement, in which John Cusack’s character remains stuck within the consciousness of his own child, a haunting nadir of psychological regression. Eternal Sunshine instead presents a hopeful transcendence of solipsism and temporality without contrivance or manipulation, an amazing feat for a film so loaded with narrative fancies. History may repeat itself, but not without a fight for love, and not without the reawakening of a passion once thought left in one’s memories. Kaufman and Gondry reach this point after examining the pain and necessity of our past impressions in a style that is at once giddy and mournful, and with characters that glide through the sorrows and triumphs of memory while we, watching it unfold, reinvent our own at the cinema.
—MICHAEL JOSHUA ROWIN