Michel Gondry

The train meeting in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004) gives us two people to watch before it asks us to untangle their memories. Ellen Kuras’s cinematography makes the encounter intimate, and Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet give us a reason to keep watching. Gondry lets the attraction register before the visual complications take over. The film is inventive, funny and worth following even when he makes it harder than it needs to be.

Music videos for Björk preceded his first feature, Human Nature (2001), written by Charlie Kaufman. Their next collaboration was Eternal Sunshine, which gives Gondry’s visual ingenuity a painful relationship to explore. He wrote The Science of Sleep (2006), using handmade effects to build its dream world, and Be Kind Rewind (2008), about remaking films by DIY methods. Those subjects suit a director drawn to practical effects and stop-motion. His move into studio filmmaking with The Green Hornet (2011) was a less comfortable fit for that approach.

In Eternal Sunshine, Kaufman’s screenplay asks what memory erasure would feel like rather than labouring over the equipment. Carrey and Winslet make the couple convincing enough for the answer to matter. We found the prospect of Joel forgetting Clementine painful because the actors make their shared life feel worth keeping. Dan Leigh’s production design makes their surroundings comfortably ordinary, so the memory-erasure imagery has something recognisable to disturb.

Valdís Óskarsdóttir’s editing keeps their feelings clear even when the order of events is difficult to place. Jon Brion’s score supplies tenderness without making every hurt seem momentous. Yet another visual disruption sometimes arrives before the previous one has had time to register. We would gladly trade those flourishes for more time with Carrey and Winslet, whose relationship needs room to develop without another interruption. Start with Eternal Sunshine and give it an evening without distractions.