“Random thoughts for Valentine’s Day, 2004. Today is a holiday invented by greeting card companies to make people feel like crap.”
These are the opening lines of “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind”, a film that I watch every Valentine’s Day. Going by the opening lines, you’d think this is an anti-romance film. I did too. And I’ve never been more happy to be proved wrong.
I don’t think I’ve ever been in love. But I’ve wanted to fall in love for a long time. I was so young when I fell in love with the idea of love. All my notions of love are due to the films I’ve watched and the books I’ve read. This particular film came at such a time in my life when I was losing faith in love. Joel and Clementine not only brought that back but made it stronger.
Both of these people loved each other. And then they didn’t. To spare themselves from the loss and grief, they underwent a procedure to forget each other. But can true love ever die? Can it be erased? How difficult it is to take that second chance?
The company that performs these procedures confiscates all the possessions and belongings that are related to or remind their client of their estranged lover. One of the employees there takes hold of these and tries to build a relationship with Clementine but to no avail. He does everything that Joel did but Clementine doesn’t fall for him. This has stayed with me the most. It’s never the gifts or the cards or the songs; it’s the person that you fall for. It’s irreplaceable. I always used to think how can people fall in love multiple times. I then realised that the void created is always there, the love as well, but we learn to love again. We make a new space for them.
When Joel is forgetting Clementine, she feels disturbed and has bouts of pain in real time. This is again something that has kept me thinking. How can love (and it’s loss) manifest as physical pain?
Before the procedure is complete, Clementine (or the memory of her) tells him ‘meet me in Montauk’. And the next day having forgotten everything else, he somehow remembers this. And she actually goes to Montauk. There is no rational explanation for this and there shouldn’t be. Love is ethereal. It’s out of this world. As said in Interstellar, it is the fourth dimension. If there’s something that can traverse and defy space-time, it’s love.
I’m a full-blown romantic and I’ve finally said it. This film has only deepened that feeling in me. There’s a phrase that I have for such kind of cinema : “films that make me love love”.
This film is my home. Like how the sun shines the brightest after dark stormy night, love perseveres and comes out stronger after all the fight and hurt. Although I don’t think that will happen, if I ever start losing faith in love again, I know what I have to do. And now maybe, you do too.
Mihir, now a practicing doctor, gracefully navigates the delicate balance between the demands of medicine and the enchantment of cinema. Amidst patient consultations and hospital rounds, he finds sanctuary and inspiration in the magical world of film. For Mihir, movies are not merely an escape but a reservoir of renewed energy, where each frame whispers tales that reignite his spirit. His dual identity as a healer and a cinephile weaves a unique tapestry, lending Review Tales a voice that is both profound and poetic.