Kevin Lally on Film

From 2004, a visionary director talks about his most celebrated film.

One of the most brilliant talents in the world of music-videos, Michel Gondry lets his prodigious imagination bloom in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, his second feature collaboration with screenwriting iconoclast Charlie Kaufman. Their first movie together, Human Nature, was a goofy but brainy comedy about the nature-vs.-nurture debate. But Focus Features’ Eternal Sunshine is a major leap forward for the pair, a haunting, complex fantasy-drama about the eternal struggle to sustain a romantic relationship. This visionary film announces Gondry’s arrival as an important feature director, and represents the most rewarding effort to date from Kaufman, the Oscar-nominated writer of Being John Malkovich and Adaptation.

The marquee-challenging title comes from the poem “Eloisa to Abelard” by Alexander Pope: “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 resigned” Those sentiments could be the inspiration for Lacuna Inc., a medical firm which specializes in erasing unpleasant memories from the human brain. Joel Barish (Jim Carrey) is devastated when he discovers, through a clerical error, that his girlfriend Clementine (Kate Winslet) has undergone the process and wiped all memories of Joel from her mind. Joel decides to reciprocate and arranges his own brain drain, but during the procedure he becomes dimly aware that a Lacuna technician (Elijah Wood) has purloined Clementine’s memories and replaced Joel in her life.

In a tour de force of surreal storytelling, much of the narrative takes place inside Joel’s head, as he battles to stop the procedure and rescue his recollections (and his love) of the mercurial Clementine. A parallel subplot follows the equally turbulent relationships of Lacuna founder Dr. Howard Mierzwiak (Tom Wilkinson), secretary Mary (Kirsten Dunst) and laid-back technician Stan (Mark Ruffalo).

The wild concept for Eternal Sunshine was originated by Gondry’s friend, artist Pierre Bismuth, further developed by Gondry, and then fleshed out into screenplay form by Kaufman. “Charlie found a very poetic way to serve a lot of the paradoxes we had to deal with,” recalls Gondry. “For instance, we didn’t know if we should have one Joel or two Joels, or how to separate the Joel in memory from the Joel watching the memories. He decided to use the present in the past. He had all the vocabulary to define the way the memory decays, and I had to find the visual vocabulary to illustrate that. It was very challenging.”

Although Eternal Sunshine employs the expected CG effects, Gondry just as often uses in-camera, on-set trickery—an aesthetic that also distinguishes his remarkable music-videos. “If you can master the technique of doing it onstage, in camera, it has the feeling of being more visceral and organic, which corresponds more to what we were looking for,” the director argues. “It’s a misconception to think that because you use high technology, you will have a more sophisticated or more surprising result. What’s great about doing the effect on the set is that all the people who work on the shooting participate. When you do a shot which involves a lot of mechanics and optics and choreography, everybody refines their position and keeps improving, because you see the work each time and you know what to do to make it better. There’s a very high concentration of energy that you can’t have if you just shoot everyone separately.”

In Eternal Sunshine, the stylistic flash is never gratuitous, but completely serves the movie’s themes. “From the beginning,” Gondry notes, “I wanted to show the feeling of the loss of a memory, why we feel a sudden happiness sometimes when we think of the past.” The story of Joel and Clementine becomes especially poignant because, as in Harold Pinter’s Betrayal, we witness the deterioration of their relationship in a backwards chronology. “When you break up with somebody,” Gondry muses, “you tend to surround yourself with the worst memories to protect yourself from regret. But when the pain starts to ease, you begin to remember the good memories—and actually it becomes more painful.”

Audiences expecting a zany Jim Carrey vehicle should be on alert that Eternal Sunshine presents Carrey in his more dramatic mode (forget The Majestic, think The Truman Show)—although he is given a hilarious sequence in which Joel reverts to childhood, hiding under his mother’s kitchen table. “I don’t think an actor should be exactly what’s on the paper, or the character should be exactly what the actor is,” Gondry argues. “It should meet in the middle, and both revolve toward one person. Maybe Joel’s character on paper was a little too passive, and Jim brought him more life. As well, Jim in other movies is very active, and this brought him to a different place. He did a great job, he has a lot of depth and emotion.”

Winslet is also terrific here, bringing equal measures of edginess and seductiveness to her restless, uninhibited character, a Barnes & Noble bookstore clerk who sports a different primary hair color in each of the story’s varying time periods.

The film was shot on location in the New York area during a particularly harsh winter, and the bracing cold shows on screen. “In the beginning, I thought we would never survive it,” Gondry recalls. “But in fact, it was another example of how contrivance can become freedom. The fact that we had to resist this unusually cold winter gave us rushes of adrenaline, and made us stick together like one person. Being outside in the freezing temperatures, everyone wanted to make it work.

“When the conditions are difficult, it gives you more freedom to do great stuff. Like when [Jim and Kate] are running on the beach and playing with the snow. That was totally unplanned. We arrived in Montauk for the weekend on a Friday night, and by Saturday morning it was covered with snow. We thought about coming back another time, but I had just seen Lost in La Mancha, the documentary on Terry Gilliam, and it made me so sad—he was the only one in his movie still having his dream, and nobody wanted to follow him. It was really upsetting for me to see that. But when I saw that, I said: No, I’m not letting the weather bring me down, I will make the shoot even better.”

Born and raised in Versailles, France, Michel Gondry began his directing career making videos for the band Oui-Oui (in which he played drums). Later, he formed an extraordinarily fruitful collaboration with Björk, creating such spectacular music-videos as “Human Behavior,” “Hyperballad,” “Jóga” and “Bachelorette.” Other wondrous Gondry videos include The Foo Fighters’ “Everlong,” Massive Attack’s “Protection,” Kylie Minogue’s dizzying “Come Into My World,” and two memorable collaborations with The White Stripes, “Fell in Love With a Girl” (animated entirely with Legos) and “The Hardest Button to Button” (stop-motion animated to every drum beat, with multiplying drum kits and amps). Gondry is also an in-demand director of commercials; his Levi’s ad “Drugstore” won the Lion d’Or at Cannes and is listed in the Guinness Book of World Records as the most award-winning commercial of all time. Many of Gondry’s videos, commercials and short films, plus a charming documentary called I’ve Been 12 Forever, are collected on a Palm Pictures disk entitled “The Work of Director Michel Gondry”—one of the best DVDs you can possibly own.

Gondry’s elaborate music-videos often place great demands on the artists, but the director contends, “When you have something really technical to do, it gives you more freedom. Especially when I shoot a singer or a musician who is not specifically a skilled actor, the fact that they have something physical or very precise to do makes them forget about all the stuff they carry with them, being a rock star. It gives them more freedom in a way to be who they are.”

The visual trickery in Gondry’s work brings to mind the original French movie magician, Georges Méliès. Gondry is pleased by the comparison. “Georges Méliès was one of the first people to witness a screening of the Freres Lumière in Paris in 1895. He immediately thought of the camera as a tool to improve his magical tricks. Interestingly, I had the same way of thinking—when I had the ability to use a camera, I always used it to explore what I could do with it, pushing the limits, and always being self-sufficient.” Expect Michel Gondry to continue pushing the limits in his burgeoning feature career.