Eternal pleasure

Rating: 9/10 (12 April 2010)

Screenwriter Charlie Kaufman's better-received Being John Malkovich was an amusing but cold oddity; director Michel Gondry's Science of Sleep was not particularly amusing and sickly cute. Sandwiched between was this loving, subtly cautionary romantic 'dramedy' about a young man, Joel (Jim Carrey), undergoing a fantastical scientific operation to remove all memory of his ex-girlfriend, the eccentric Clementine (Kate Winslet). The procedure draws him deep into his subconscious, and we're invited along for the ride. This second collaboration between Kaufman and Gondry (after 2001's Human Nature) has deservedly become something of a cult favourite.
Forget Garden State: while Eternal Sunshine shares a desire to explore the truth behind the human condition through a skewed fish-eye lens, it is mercifully free of that film's cloying sentimentality, its narcissism, and its contempt for a mainline predefined as banal. In Garden State, people are kooky but phony, shallow and self-absorbed; Eternal Sunshine's Joel, meanwhile, is powerless against his absorption into the strange fearful passions of his dreams. With impressive psychological literacy, Kaufman and Gondry's film shows us the selfishness of human desire and are - crucially - critical of it. Hollywood loves nothing more than to make lovers of ill-suited characters thrown together by circumstance. Not so here: the joy of watching Joel and Clementine's relationship blossom - and fade - is that it is a product of choice as much as chance, and so it is believable.
Winslet puts in a signature performance; her Clementine is the extrovert to Carrey's Joel. Carrey, meanwhile, scribbles out his signature entirely: nary a mug passes across his face. His is a soulful turn of poise and intelligence.
Eternal Sunshine finds its home on DVD - by the third or fourth viewing you should have the fractured narrative pretty much sussed. Plus, it's ideal night-in viewing: warm, friendly, funny, and profound. In a cynical and ironic era, it's heartening to watch a film that finds love so alive and so precious. A classic.