A strange but full-of-emotions love story that's ever been brought to the big screen.

Rating: 10/10 (11 July 2019)

Though I'd heard of this movie for a very long time, I just watched it recently. And honestly, I've been asking myself ever since why I hadn't done it sooner. It's such a beautiful and remarkable romantic screenplay that I would not hesitate to recommend to anyone around me.
This movie is all about one thing and one thing alone: love in its purest meaning. The story has no more nor less than what any of us has been living in our couple's everyday life. Joel is an ordinary guy with a very normal (not to say boring) life, nothing had seemed to be much alive until the day he met Clementine. She, on the other hand, is an unconventional girl who changes her hair color depending on her mood at the moment. Like two opposite poles of a magnet, they fell for each other right away. And like every ordinary couple, they enjoyed their time together, they had fun together, but they also fought. As they are so different, they fought a lot. Though all those fights have never made them stop loving each other, one time, they fought so badly for some stupid reason that they decided to do something terrible that they've both regretted ever since: they went to Lacuna Inc. - a company specialized in wiping away customer's undesired memories... The erasing is an all night process of mapping and killing of the target memories. And here what's made this movie so special: almost the entire love story was told inside Joel's mind while we were walked through all the key memories of their relationship, just before every of them faded away into nothing during the erasing process.
It started with the most recent ones - their biggest stupid fight and some another before it, in which Clementine and Joel looked like 2 miserable persons who don't fit together and all they've been doing is to make the other suffer. But as we traveled backward, the memories got better and better. Witnessing the very same couple in their best moment, seeing how deeply they love each other, we finally understood why they were together at the first place. And that's also the time when Joel realized how much those memories mean to him and began to regret his impulsive decision. So he hopelessly tried every single thing he could think of in order to save all the memories he had left of Clementine, but it's too late... It's thrilling watching all those desperate attempts of Joel's mind, the movie showed us how amazingly our brain functions in creating new memory by mixing existing ones. Yes, remember when Joel tried to hide Clementine in some of his childhood memories? He was creating a new memory of her! But sadly, even this new one couldn't escape the erasure. As the process went on, no matter how hard Joel tried, his memories of Clementine continued to disappear one by one, until there was nothing left of her...
"[...]
Clementine: This is it Joel. It's going to be gone soon.
Joel: I know.
Clementine: What do we do?
Joel: Enjoy it.
[...]"
Facing the inevitable forgetting - the fact that they will be gone forever from each other's memory, they just enjoyed their last moment together.
The reason why I've placed this movie at the number one of its genre (romance) is because what it delivered is love in its true form, no more no less. No shiny romantic scene, no "the 2 of us against the world" situation, no drama with a lot of tears... It's just love, in normal life, of 2 very ordinary person, but brought to us in the most fascinating way! Following the whole erasure process, then seeing them falling for each other again as 2 complete strangers, that's made me realize how strong love can be. Even though all the memories were erased, the emotions, the feelings they'd had for each other are still there, buried deep down in their heart and mind, just waiting for the day they met again to come out...
And at the end, when they both learned about the truth, about all the heartbreaking things they'd done to each other:
"[...]
Joel: I can't see anything that I don't like about you.
Clementine: But you will! But you will. You know, you will think of things. And I'll get bored with you and feel trapped because that's what happens with me.
Joel: ... Okay.
Clementine: ... Okay.
[...]"
Then they laughed and cried, and they're together again.
Yes, that's what love is all about.