Jul 14, 2005 03:58 PM
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(Updated Jul 14, 2005 03:58 PM)
''Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless mind''...What’s in a name…well sometimes, everything! -A very thoughtful title of a very radical plot which’ll encapsulate you from beginning till the end!
The movie revolves around the idea that relationships make or break a person’s life and technology dares to give individuals a chance to rework on their life by giving them an option to erase the memories of failed relationships of their past.
The actors include Jim Carrey, Kate Winslet and Kirsten Dunst to name a few. The performances by all three are brilliant and I am not sure they understood the reverse recursive multi-looped dimensions to the plot while they performed but they were quite convincing nevertheless.
I will not reveal the storyline here for two reasons...a. its more fun seeing it first hand and b. its too complicated a plot for me to put in words…it involves reliving your past in dreams in reverse order knowing that you are dreaming and also knowing its actually being deleted from your memory and then you are trying to prevent it from happening by hiding aspects of your past in dreams which did not have those aspects. So in a way you are communicating with yourself at 3 levels…in present subconscious state, in a recent past stage inside a dream and in an old past stage inside a dream where you want to shift data from your recent past stage.
The movie has won Oscars and other awards and has been critically appreciated all over in 2004. The ending is how it ought to be. But I felt that there is something conceptually wrong with its basics of the memory erasing process. That we can replace our past with a new present is not actually a real option one can have simply because one person’s past has a 6-degree impact effectively affecting every single person’s life in this world. I can simplify it with an example. Suppose I loose memory of my past relationship, then it will not only affect my ex-partner but also her relationships with those around her and my relationships with those around me subsequently affecting relationships in the second degree of association and so on…This doesn’t seem to come up in the movie in any way and also you can’t just have a blank memory in your mind for the periods which were deleted!
What I genuinely like about the screenplay was the crafting of two and three time dimensions in one scene like the one with baby Jim Carrey hiding under a table with grownup Kate Winslet when it’s raining inside the house indicating an intermediate time to which neither belongs! Can you beat that!!!
Movies with multidimensional time and space status are always intriguing. Some such movies include The Hours, Sliding Doors, 12 Monkeys, The Matrix, Pulp Fiction, The Others etc. and this (ESSM) is another addition to this very interesting list of complex narratives.
