movies like eternal sunshine of the spotless mind

The experiment goes haywire instead of reliving a single minute, he winds up reliving his entire fated romance, snippet by snippet, completely out of order, with no control over what’s happening.Įternal Sunshine has more humor and a more legible romance than Resnais’s grimly nihilistic, harrowing classic, as well as tropes that speak to the moment of its release. He survives, and because he clearly has no will to live, he gets recruited for a dangerous scientific experiment in which he’s sent back in time one year, for a single minute. The movie, written by Charlie Kaufman (who won an Academy Award for his work in 2005), bears more than a superficial resemblance to Alain Resnais’s 1968 masterpiece Je T’aime, Je T’aime, in which a lover’s death spurs a man to attempt suicide. But per its by-now famous conceit, that story unfolds in retrospect, flashing up on-screen as it’s being erased from the lovers’ memories bit by bit. Eternal Sunshine certainly has the rise and fall, and more than its share of sincere, lovelorn melodrama. Only we don’t experience their relationship in real time, following the linear rise and fall of the typical movie romance, with its structurally predictable melodrama. Joel, played by Jim Carrey, and Clementine ( Kate Winslet) are the clashing, depressed, impulsive personalities at the center of Michel Gondry’s beloved 2004 movie, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. They don’t get married, but they do date. “I’m going to marry you,” says Clementine, aloud. “Why do I fall in love with every woman I see who shows me the least bit of attention?” Joel thinks. He sees her again on the train platform headed back home-she playfully tries to get his attention-and again on the train itself, where she introduces herself as Clementine, defensively accosting him for not even knowing how to make fun of her name, the way everyone else apparently has.

He sees her again at a nearby diner, where he catches her spiking her coffee.

On the beach, Joel sees a woman with blue hair, in an orange hoodie.

“Sand is overrated,” he thinks at one point, idly picking at his wet surroundings. It’s freezing cold and snowing-it’s February in New York-but he decides to walk the beach anyway so that he can write in his journal and mope in peace. A man named Joel heads out to work-then, realizing that he’s miserable, changes his mind and goes to Montauk.

Movies like eternal sunshine of the spotless mind