Gondry maps out Joel's past with breathtaking imagination and sleight-of-hand, creating a visual collage from Joel's memories that is a masterpiece of editing and aligning entirely different times and places. It's not a new idea; the great Andrei Tarkovsky's masterpiece The Mirror is a surreal and profound poem sewn from the threads of his memory. But Gondry's a more playful, puckish storyteller. He cannot resist the wild possibilities presented by Kaufman's script. Sometimes it's as if Joel's past has been disassembled like a LEGO project and haphazardly pieced together into something frightening and new. I've never seen something so true to the experience of dreaming, from the way people's faces morph from one thing to another to the way events take place against incongruous backdrops. These imaginative tangents are enough to show up most Hollywood productions as creatively bankrupt.
Kaufman clearly surpasses himself. For the first time he delivers an ending that doesn't feel like either a cop-out or a throwaway, even if it's Hollywood to the core. He's also figured out a structure that perfectly matches the emotional tenor of his theme and isn't just an amusement-park ride that can be forgotten as soon as it's over. Furthermore, he's working with people -- notably writer-director Gondry, cowriter Bismuth (a visual artist), and actors Jim Carrey, Kate Winslet, Elijah Wood, Mark Ruffalo, Kirsten Dunst, and Tom Wilkinson -- who are willing to serve the screenplay as a team rather than take it as an opportunity to show off.
It could be argued that in spite of all their giddy and hilarious screwball elements, Kaufman's features are largely about the desire of tormented neurotics to obliterate themselves. Eternal Sunshine -- whose central couple, apart from their suicidal tendencies, bear more than a passing resemblance to Woody Allen and Diane Keaton in Annie Hall -- addresses this theme more directly than the other Kaufman films, using a setup suggested by Bismuth and elaborated by Gondry: a company called Lacuna helps lovesick people recover by obliterating their memories of their former partners. Significantly, the question "Is there any danger of brain damage?" gets the immediate reply "Technically speaking, the procedure is brain damage." The movie introduces this as a science fiction concept, yet it feels too contemporary to belong in the future. Indeed, it might be said to already exist in a less targeted form when people elect to undergo shock therapy.
Lastly in the scene that sees Stan and Mary dancing in their underwear over Joel's inert body on his fold-out sofa at first seems like a cruel screenwriter's conceit. But in this movie, execution is almost everything, and the poetic aptness of one lovesick individual being indifferent to the lovesickness of someone else makes the concept work.
 

Voto: 28/30

25.10.2004