Journey Into a Mind Under Siege

There is a dizzying and diverse history of mental images in movies. The succession of moving images thrown up onscreen are a staging ground for an examination of the processes of a single, subjective consciousness: a beam cast inside someone's head.

Over the course of the five films he has written, Charlie Kaufman has shown that he cannot seem to help himself in his mad pursuit of giving material form to whatever transpires in the mind. In Being John Malkovich, point-of-view shots render wishful fantasies as hijackings of skulls. Now, in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, much of the action physically traverses the memories of its main character, and a whole compendium of techniques renders the links between these moments. The story that Kaufman developed for the project takes off from the idea of a memory-erasure procedure and comes from Pierre Bismuth and director Michel Gondry, whose first feature was the Kaufman-scripted Human Nature.

The head we slip inside in Sunshine is that of Joel, a reserved, shabby guy played by Jim Carrey through retreating, slumped body postures and hesitant gestures. After learning that his girlfriend, the eccentric Clementine (Kate Winslet), has left him for good and wiped her memory clean of their relationship, he seeks the same treatment. Put to sleep in his apartment bed, Joel starts to undergo the nightlong operation. The remainder of the film shifts between two perspectives: an associative shuttle through Joel's recollections exists alongside a night of hectic occurrences involving the staff of the memory-erasure outfit.

Gondry and Kaufman delve through memory onscreen in a relentless hurtle from one mental compartment to another in a maze of switchbacks, collisions, transformations. We are far from the subdued ebb and flow of memory portrayed in another love story with quiet sci-fi genre trappings--Alain Resnais's tragically neglected movie Je t'aime, je t'aime (1967), in which a man participating in a time-travel experiment sifts through the debris of his past. In Sunshine, as Joel tries to save his perishing memories, the disjunctive realm of memory becomes a site of desperate action. The brain is laid open to invasion in a sort of bounding horror-adventure story, with Joel and Clementine in desperate flight from the memory-erasing intrusion they brought upon themselves.

The word "surreal," like "magical realist" or "absurdist," is often a worthless stylistic label made meaningless from overuse. But it makes sense to say that Gondry dances around the borders of a form of popular surrealism. This surrealist mode tames vertigo and psychic frenzy and darkness, and instead represents the marvelous in popular culture.

In the world of memory Gondry creates, there is a side trip into Joel's childhood, a stretch that relies on the comedy of disproportion and discrepancy in scale. As more fragments of Joel's relationship vanish, Gondry calls upon the tried-and-true metaphors of crumbling architecture, the sands of time at the ocean shore, and long aisles and corridors. At times, these visual solutions ring false, too stale and sedate: the bed that sits on the beach, effaced mannequin-like bodies, one image of a face with teary, inverted eyes that is straight out of Man Ray's photography.

The influence of Gondry's music-video origins is evident in the inventory of effects he enlists to convey the transitions through time and space: portals with double roles, flickering and flare-outs, speed changes, shifts in film stock quality, digital work on faces. Despite Gondry's invention and originality, his sensibility tends to give each shot a detached quality, as if one design or visual effect encompasses all that is there.

Kaufman's screenwriting is driven by its generating premises, its high-concept setups. Given this point of departure, one watches his films and finds there always seems to be the looming possibility that these devices will overtake everything, leaving the work anemic and begging for some room to breathe. Sunshine maintains an assured, swift rhythm, which creates a feeling that we are continually skimming over the surface of these moments. You are never allowed to escape the growing clutter of the narrative, sink fully into the passing scenes, and share their lived presence. This is regrettable because Kaufman and Gondry are so strong otherwise. If the film is at times too manic and notional, it is still an intelligent and often invigorating work. The exchange that closes the movie takes the feeling of sorrow that has seeped into the romance and turns it into something remarkably sad and hopeful.