Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

[poliphilo]

There's very little sunshine. The action takes place in winter- and mostly at night. But then Pope, in the original poem, is talking about a person (a vestal virgin) entirely cut off from human relationships- and that's an unattainable, inhuman ideal. The sunshine, if we could ever move into it, would be too terrible to bear. The up-side of the movie is that we need one another. The downside is that memory- which constitutes our identity- is a terribly fragile thing. The film is shot and edited in a way that reinforces this last idea; the camera wavers, the angle changes, the frame darkens, people are always moving out of shot. You try to grasp at an image and it eludes you. At one stage this restlessness up on the screen had me feeling physically sick.

The casting is perverse, but it works: Carey is passive, Winslett is manic and cute little, noble little Frodo plays a bug-eyed sleaze!