Blah Blah Flowers

Whatever you do, wherever you go, remember this. Joey Deacon is watching you. Oh yes.

Back from Brighton, had a lovely couple of days with the divine Ms. Plums and also Meme Buggerer from Barbelith, back down from the frigid north. It's a shame the weather wouldn't behave, I arrived in the midst of heavy rain on Monday afternoon, it had finished when we went out in the evening but returned the following morning along with heavy winds. The rain left for a sunny afternoon but as this morning turned into afternoon the sun has been broken by showers. Still, we managed.

Monday night we met up with friends for a drink and a chat, finally got to meet the lovely bus stop girl and share the woes of funding, caught up with libris and heard a bit about what she did on her holiday, and see and speak to D and A (of sadly deceased Brighton group Flying Machine) for the first time in yer actual years. Can't remember the name of the pub/restaurant off the top of my head, but it was the veggie one near the bottom of the street that runs down below the station. They were giving away free shots of vodka which were democratically voted to be fucking vile and which we found did genuinely remove the varnish from the table quicker than you might fancy for a spirit.

Tuesday afternoon Plums and myself went to see Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. 'Reality' is one of those dangerous terms to use about film, too often being used to mean "lots of swearing and at some point you see some woman's baps!", but this is one of the most 'real' relationship films I've ever seen. None of that '[character a] gets [character b], [looses character b], humiliates themself and gets [character b] back in the final reel' stuff here. It's 'honest', if [character a] really fucks up, [character b] will leave them and not come back. I wonder how many people will see this film believing from either the misleading promo material or writer Charlie Kaufman's previous work that it will be a quirky but generally light-hearted romantic comedy? Boy, are you going to be surprised.

When Joel Barish (an amazing Jim Carrey, his best performance ever and at no point at all does he use any of his more annoying funny man tics) finds out that his ex-girlfriend Clementine (Kate Winslet and an array of hair dyes) has used the services of a clinic to erase her memories of their relationship he decides to undergo the same procedure. Only once it's underway he changes his mind. As they work back through his memories he desperately tries to save them from being destroyed.

Okay, there's going to be SPOILERS ahead, so if you don't want to know the score, look away now. What we're actually given here is a horror movie and Gondry works this up from the start, understated use of steadicam keeps us concerned before we know why we should be. And there's lots of tight filming in small rooms or rooms draped in shadows, even outside our characters stand under blank skies or, in the case of when Joel and Clemmie go star watching, we stay in close on their faces rather than look up at the heavens with them.

It's the finest of Kaufman's three main scripts, I have issues with the final third of Adaptation and though very good Being John Malkovitch sometimes gets sidetracked with extraneous wacky, but Kaufman keeps focused in this and the film is much better as a result. This isn't a Philip K. Dick movie, it's too warm, too human and at no point does the internal world of Joel's mind break out into the real one, though the outer one sometimes intrudes within. This film is not concerned with what is real and what isn't. It's about the value of experience. The one thing that does at times seem odd is exactly what it is that attracts Joel to Clementine and vice versa, he is extremely shy and repressed and she loud, impulsive and bossy/aggressive, characteristics to drive them apart but I'm not sure what brings them together in the first place. Anyway...

Anyone that finds the story difficult to understand should consider locking themselves in a room somewhere so they can't hurt anyone, or perhaps running for President of the United States. It's amazingly straight forward and Gondry tries to make it look lo-fi while using any number of deceptive and subtle tricks, blurring away the titles on books when Joel remembers meeting up with Clemmie in the bookshop where she works, blurring his memory of meeting a friend when he's not really paying attention. But at no point do these things detract from the performances of those in them, a clever bit of trick photography does nothing to detract from Joel's frustration at being stuck in the memory of a road which is the same at both ends with him trapped in the middle, of trying to confront the memory of Clemmie's new boyfriend and no matter how he tries to turn him round only seeing the back of his head.

And Elijah Wood does seem to get a bit of a raw deal as the new boyfriend Patrick. It seems as though his part were bigger and then hastily cut back or edited out, he's good as the slightly creepy guy in the middle that we see using most of Joel's words and moves to try and charm Clemmie (as she no longer remembers Joel using them first) but when the film approaches it's end it seems a bit disjointed how he's left hung out to dry. Does Clemmie somehow sense that Pat is using someone else's words and trinkets to try and win her, or did she actually find them irritating rather than endearing when Joel used them? We always see Patrick and Clemmie's relationship from the angle of wanting it to fail, either through the mask of Joel's perceptions or as the audience. A nice touch is that we can see that Joel tends to consider himself a lot more active and passionate in his head than he really is in real life but, as I said before, internal Joel is not an excuse for Carrey to turn into the Mask, even if Joel is in a number of ways a Stanley Ipkiss that was never able to find a way to release his repressed emotions.

There's a real sense of horror as Joel's memories fade around him, though it's never quite clear how he can remember something is wrong, until he wakes up at the end of the procedure he's aware that he's forgetting Clemmie even though he's forgetting it's Clemmie he's forgetting. And ah yes, the end of the procedure. I was dubious that Joel was really going to completely forget Clementine. All too often we see film characters do impossible things because either the famous lead character doesn't want to do something or the studios want a tacked-on happy ending. But to have Joel try and fail to save the memory of his girlfriend is much more powerful, even though that's not the end of the film. The climax, as a self-aware Clemmie tries to get Joel to deal with why their first encounter in a deserted house ended badly as the memory deletion process literally tears the house down around them is extremely well done, as Joel acknowledges that he finds the power of Clementine as repellent as alluring.

It's interesting that Gondry casts two english actors in such prominent roles, Tom Wilkinson and Kate Winslet. I'll leave American viewers to judge how good their accents are. Wilkinson's Dr. Mierzwiak isn't as developed as he could be, when we're punched with the information that he's already had an affair with his receptionist Mary (Kirsten Dunst) our emotions are fixed by her reaction to the news, less by the horror of someone we thought was a distant but generally kindly man manipulating things, trying to use his technology to reset things as they were so that he can try again. The lesson we pick up from the film is that erasing memories is running away or ignoring the problem, we never hear that much about why Clemmie decides to forget Joel, more why he thinks she's decided to forget him, but it does seem that she did so because something about that relationship jeopardised her sense of self and she forgets him in order to maintain that. Joel meanwhile does it just as an act of revenge that neither he nor Clementine would ever remember and with such a weak reason it's no wonder he's the first to change his mind. Mierzwiak probably hopes that with Mary forgetting that an office affair didn't work before he'll have another chance in future, by not learning from his mistake and perhaps letting Mary go instead he looses his marriage and, presumerably, his business too, though apparently a scene cut from the script suggests that Joel and Clemmie keep using his services again and again in the future.

And this is where 'realism' comes in again, the hero passes through fire and gets the girl, even if they hated one another at first now they compliment each other. We don't get that here, even though we get a big push from Kaufman to think that a new relationship where they already know what it is about each other that drives the other crazy, the last shot of them on the beach in the distance, looping several times before fading into the credits, instead suggests they will not learn they are bad for one another but will keep learning the lesson, then paying Mierzwiak to unlearn it.

More rambling on this one to come later, I was nearly in tears again when it was over and despite what I said about RotK at Christmas this is a rare thing to happen. However, David manages to say a lot more than me in a lot less space, and as ever it's causing heated debate at Barbelith, so check them out too.