On Charlie Kaufman's Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004) and why it is the best film about memory and love.

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind was directed by Michel Gondry but the architecture is Kaufman's, and the architecture is what makes it more than a formally ingenious science fiction premise.

The film follows Joel Barish through the process of having his memories of his ex-girlfriend Clementine erased. The structure — which begins at the end, proceeds to the beginning, and then moves forward and backward simultaneously — mirrors the experience of grief: the way you loop back through a relationship, revisiting moments with new information, losing your chronological grip.

But what makes the film great rather than merely structurally clever is how it handles the specific texture of long-term relationships. The early memories are tender. The late memories are corrosive. The early memories become precious because they're disappearing. This is not a narrative trick; it's an accurate representation of how we value what we are losing.

The ending, which is deliberately ambivalent — these two people will make the same mistakes again and they know it and they choose each other anyway — is the most honest romantic ending in American cinema.