![]() ![]() Wilkinson and his staff at Lacuna are suitably disturbing in their seeming ordinariness. Carrey and Winslet play well together both are naturally aggressive performers with actively expressive eyes. In this, it resembles the now classic Groundhog Day. The serious philosophical and psychological ambitions are kept up its sleeve rather than worn on it. This is done by parcelling up objects that recall that person, then going with a brain scanner to those points in the cranium that have registered this now unwanted figure.īoth the hero and heroine engage Lacuna's services and when Joel asks the insouciant Dr Mierzwiak if such a process can cause brain damage, he is coolly re-assured: 'Technically speaking, the procedure is brain damage.'Īs that line suggests, Eternal Sunshine is a very funny and unsentimental film, a romantic comedy with absurdist undertones. Lacuna specialises in the selective eradication of memory, specifically in taking away all traces of a particular person through a cross between science and witchcraft. In Eternal Sunshine, there is a similar organisation called Lacuna, housed in a rather messy side-street office and run by the slightly dotty Dr Howard Mierzwiak (Tom Wilkinson) and three skittish, unreliable assistants (Mark Ruffalo, Elijah Wood, Kirsten Dunst). In Seconds, an unhappy man learns of a secret organisation that can transform, at a price, his identity and allow him to lead a new life divorced from the past. ![]() This is the visual style pursued throughout Eternal Sunshine. In the former, an American platoon in Korea is kidnapped by the Chinese and brainwashed (a term introduced into English during the Korean War) and the movie opens with a virtuoso sequence where what we see shifts constantly between the distorted worlds per ceived by the victims and the reality of their manipulators. But Eternal Sunshine most brings to mind two major John Frankenheimer films of the 1960s, The Manchurian Candidate and Seconds. There have been a number of recent movies about memories, real and false: Christopher Nolan's Memento for instance, and Tim Burton's Big Fish. But it transpires that both are, in fact, trying to write each other out of their lives. She draws him out, he softens her up and an affair begins. ![]() They appear to meet, seemingly by chance, one winter's day in the Long Island resort of Montauk. He's quiet, cautious and introverted, recording the world in an illustrated journal. From one minute to another, or one second to another, we're not sure that what we're seeing is reality or illusion.Įssentially, it is about a contrasted, or complementary, pair of lovers, Joel (Jim Carrey) and Clementine (Kate Winslet). ![]() In the poem, based on the letters she wrote about her enduring passion, Eloïsa envies the chaste virgins who have no such memories to torment them: 'How happy is the blameless Vestal's lot!/ The world forgetting, by the world forgot:/ Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind!/ Each pray'r accepted and each wish resign'd.'ĭirected by Michel Gondry, a filmmaker celebrated for music videos and commercials, the movie concerns love and memory and the pain and happiness they bring, the way people exist in our minds and we in theirs.īut as the screenplay is by Charlie Kaufman, who scripted Being John Malkovich, Adaptation and Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, the approach to the subject is quirky, witty, elliptical. It comes from the Epistle of Eloïsa to Abelard, Alexander Pope's poem about the great twelfth-century lovers, who were separated by the church, she incarcerated in a convent, he castrated and appointed abbot of a remote monastery. F ilms with literary titles like For Whom the Bell Tolls and Gone With the Wind are mostly adapted from novels, so it's unusual for a movie with an original screenplay to have a title - and a rather beautiful one - like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. ![]()
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