ETERNAL SUNSHINE OF THE SPOTLESS MIND ****
DIRECTED BY Michel Gondry
STARRING Jim Carrey, Kate Winslet, Mark Ruffalo, Elijah Wood
US 2004 107 mins.
50 FIRST DATES **1/2
DIRECTED BY Peter Segal
STARRING Adam Sandler, Drew Barrymore, Rob Schneider, Sean Astin
US 2004 99 mins.
Memory, it seems, is a fragile thing these days. Short-term memory loss featured in Clean Slate (starring Dana Carvey, a.k.a. Garth from Wayne’s World) some years back, reached its apotheosis in the brilliant Memento, and now appears in two films showing at Cyprus cinemas. Is it a result of shorter attention spans, our fear of forgetting something vital as we’re constantly bombarded with information – new websites, new gadgets, Next Big Things – from all corners of a globalised world? Discuss.
Not that memory loss is a problem in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind; in fact it’s a blessing, carried out by a firm called Lacuna Inc on willing, paying customers who want to erase memories of unhappy relationships – a kind of plastic surgery for the mind. The film has been marketed as a wacky comedy – it stars Jim Carrey – but in fact it’s moody and bittersweet (though often funny), shot through with a rueful romanticism: it’s about the way relationships go wrong, and the perverse romantic impulse that makes people keep trying anyway. “Everybody’s gotta learn sometime,” goes the Korgis song on the soundtrack – yet no-one ever does.
You should pick your audience carefully for this one. Thematically, to be sure, it’s a Carrey movie. He’s the ultimate narcissist, having already played God (Bruce Almighty) and a man whose entire world revolves around himself (The Truman Show); much of Eternal Sunshine takes place inside its hero’s head, making for yet another case of Reality being upstaged by Jim Carrey – his character literally is the movie. In all other ways, however, it’s a film guaranteed to alienate his younger fanbase: no coarse slapstick or funny voices, no straightforward narrative (it juggles with Time, looking back on the relationship after it’s over); even the visuals are daunting, given a non-glamorous look by music-video director Michel Gondry. Much of it looks scruffy (as if shot on video), though the casual style does give rise to one lovely image, an icy lake at night with a convoy of car headlights creeping down a road in the distance.
The film takes a while to get going. Shy, withdrawn Carrey meets extrovert Kate Winslet on a train, and they click straight away – but when he drives her home a young man (Elijah Wood, a.k.a. Frodo) knocks on his car window, mysteriously asking “Can I help you?”. Only then do the opening credits roll, and we gradually realise the pre-credits scene was a flash-forward, its significance emerging only at the end. It’s written by Charlie Kaufman, the hottest – or is it coolest? – screenwriter in Hollywood, whose previous work (Being John Malkovich, Adaptation) was ingenious but slightly diminished by an obsession with celebrity culture. This is his best, truest film, the one most attuned to people over gimmicks; the ending, with its wry semi-optimism, is supremely touching.
I’m finding it hard to describe Eternal Sunshine (the title comes from Alexander Pope), except to say it’s the best film of the year and you really ought to catch it before it disappears. But how to define this wry, slippery comedy? Maybe it’s a comment on our Age of Convenience, where nothing has to hurt and everything is possible; on a more post-modern level, the rubbing-out of Carrey’s memories – visibly erased as he wanders through them – echoes digital technology, with its limitless promise of ‘improving’ the image. Or maybe it’s all about Memory, and Memento’s point that Memory is selective, a construct: we remember what we want to remember. Carrey and Winslet use Memory as a weapon to kill their love – but love proves resilient. Brainwashed or not, the lovers choose to follow their heart. Isn’t it romantic?
More of the same in 50 First Dates, though the film – an Adam Sandler vehicle – has a terrible time digging out a happy ending for its memory-loss scenario, especially since it’s also trying to be funny. Drew Barrymore suffers from Groundhog Day Syndrome – only it’s worse, because it’s all in her head. Each day she wakes up and thinks it’s the morning of the day when she nearly died in a car accident (which of course she doesn’t remember) many months before. Each day, to protect her, her Dad and brother make everything the way it was that day, including fake newspapers and unpainted walls, which they spend the night unpainting. Confused? So’s Sandler, who loves the girl and spends each day winning her heart, only to find she’s totally forgotten him when she wakes up next day.
Like most Sandler vehicles, the film is schizophrenic. All that’s missing are the eruptions of volcanic rage from Happy Gilmore or Mr. Deeds – but what’s there is already weird enough, a stew of unlikely ingredients. Ingredient #1: saccharine jokes involving children and animals – a ‘funny’ penguin (our hero is a vet), a walrus, a gaggle of Hawaiian kids out of an Elvis Presley movie. Ingredient #2: crude jokes, often involving Rob Schneider as Sandler’s sidekick who urges him to give a girl “the Waikiki sneakie between the cheekie” (did we mention the bit where the walrus drenches someone in projectile vomit?). All this, then Ingredient #3: earnest romantic pathos as Sandler courts Drew, desperately tries not to hurt her, waiting for Love to salve her broken psyche.
Watching the film is just bizarre. One minute you’re watching the lovers tenderly share a first kiss, the next you’ve got cringe-making jokes about wet dreams (Sean Astin, with a lisp, is amusing as Drew’s incontinent brother). One minute you’re watching Adam serenade Drew with a sweet song called ‘Forgetful Lucy’ (“Forgetful Lucy / Has got a big caboose-y”), the next you’ve got Schneider doing crude slapstick, or bad-taste gags about Sandler’s androgynous assistant. Did he want to make a sensitive romance but didn’t think his fans would stand for it? Or is it just that no comedy is complete without walrus penis jokes these days?
There’s a gulf in quality between 50 First Dates and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, yet both deal in similar emotions – the transience of love (nothing ever lasts), and the fickleness of Memory: just like Kate Winslet, Drew decides the only way out is to “erase you completely”. Does it resonate with something in the zeitgeist – some unconscious sense that our lives are too comfortable, based on escapism and denial? Are we afraid we’ve erased too much, trying to be happy? How strange that two films starring famously crude comics should both evoke this sophisticated yearning, as poignant and ineffable as Adam’s plea to Drew, knowing it’s hopeless: “Don’t forget about me”.
“IMAGES AND VIEWS OF THE ALTERNATIVE CINEMA”
All hail the Cultural Services of the Ministry of Culture, whose annual avant-garde festival is almost as worthy as their annual Summer Marathon of oldies. In fact, it may be even more worthy, shining a spotlight on films so obscure you could live in London or New York for years and never get to see them.
Indeed, this year’s selection may perhaps be too obscure. Shifting the focus from the US to Europe and North Africa is only right and proper, but last year’s slate included well-known names like Michael Snow (of Wavelength fame) and Kenneth Anger, and the year before included Andy Warhol. This year, there are three main strands to the festival – Alain Resnais, the Lettrist Movement and ‘New Algerian Cinema’; only the first of these is truly world-class, and the last-named is bafflingly obscure – except perhaps in France, whence presumably the programme originates.
The big news is undoubtedly Alain Resnais, now in his 80s but still one of the seminal forces in world cinema (his latest, Not on the Lips, should be available on DVD in a couple of months). The festival shows the 50s shorts that made his name, as well as two of his films. The films are Last Year at Marienbad (1961) and the rather untypical La Guerre Est Finie (1966) while the shorts include Night and Fog (1955), one of the great cinematic comments on the Holocaust.
Far more allusive and poetic than the likes of Schindler’s List, Night and Fog – clocking in at a mere 32 minutes – starts with footage of present-day Auschwitz, gradually giving way to newsreels and film clips telling something of what happened there during WW2. Made a mere decade after the end of the war, it’s entirely free of self-righteousness or cheap point-scoring: much more than a film about the Nazis, it’s about Past and Present, and the ghosts that linger in an evil – yet apparently ordinary – place.
Even more impressive (and more avant-garde) is Last Year at Marienbad, a film unlike any other – and surely the most unlikely box-office hit of all time. Plotless and meticulously designed, this near-abstract drama became a sensation in 1961, though few punters could’ve vouchsafed what it ‘means’; it remains hypnotic once you adjust to its rhythm, set in a vast, baroque hotel where a woman meets a man who insists she had an affair with him the previous year in Frederiksbad (or was it Marienbad?). Think of the camera prowling down hotel corridors in The Shining and you’re halfway there (but only halfway). Showing tonight in what’s hopefully a good print, Marienbad is the highlight of this year’s festival.
Not that La Guerre Est Finie (showing tomorrow) is inferior; indeed, it may be even better than Marienbad, a deeply romantic film starring Yves Montand as a Spanish Civil War veteran. But there seems no reason to include this fine drama in an “Alternative Cinema” festival: despite a couple of flash-forwards, it’s hardly ‘experimental’. Elsewhere, we have the opposite problem: the rather esoteric films of the Lettrist Movement – whose main proponents are Isidore Idou and Maurice Lemaitre – are of interest mostly to academics; and the ‘New Algerian Cinema’, as already mentioned, is completely unknown.
Still, the festival remains very much a Good Thing – and may already be bearing fruit in Cyprus. Thursday’s programme features a lineup of local artists working in the avant-garde, with 13 shorts and intriguing titles like Eat the Art and The Shape of a Relationship. How many, I wonder, were inspired by watching previous editions of the festival? One would be enough.
Screenings at Theatro Ena, Athinas 4, Nicosia. Daily at 9 p.m., to June 26. Free admission. Tel: 22-348203
