After their relationship ends, Joel discovers that Clementine went to a company that cancels specific parts of the memory in order to eliminate all her recollections of him. He decides to undergo the same treatment; however, during the operation, he changes his mind and tries to hide with her (with the memory of her), in the labyrinth of his memories, in order to prevent her from being erased. The attempt fails, but they are nonetheless destined to meet again for the first time. This is the story of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind in chronological order, but it does not take account of its director Michel Gondry’s kaleidoscopic visual puns or its screenwriter Charlie Kaufman’s tormented written maze. The plot abandons all linearity, transforming the story into a series of paradoxical temporal blockages in which real and mental dimensions are mixed up and confused. In the ceaseless transition from one recollection to the next, Joel’s memory becomes a traversable space that takes on the twisted and enveloping forms of time, breaking the rules of physics and adopting the fantastic and impossible contours of a dream. All this is rendered through visionary directorial and scenographic solutions, such as the impossible proximity of places separated by space and time, the “palindromic” alley in which Joel pursues Clementine, and bodies and decor are disproportionate in size. Eternal Sunshine is the film that most clearly confirms the crisis of memory, and the fears over its loss, which characterise a certain strand of postmodern cinema. Memory is represented as a fluid spacetime that lacks order or linearity, which does not respond to any coherent logic, where contradiction rules and the maxim that “nothing is created or destroyed” collapses. And yet, the real thematic core of Gondry’s film is not the erasure of memory, but its persistence, with a powerful and liberating openness to possible alternate worlds and the human capacity to correct one’s mistakes.

Alice Autelitano