2.     The Framing of Time

'Sunshine' and 'eternal' are inimical; 'Sunshine' by its very nature fades with every day's close; eternity is a constant. Although the chronological sequence of events is blurred, the action of the film occurs over two days around, of course, Valentine's Day (amusingly, one of Lacuna's busiest times of the year). During the first day, Joel finds that he has lost Clementine, and that she has had him erased from her memory, and he resolves to erase his memory. During the night he resists the erasure, following the chain of memories of Clementine back to their first meeting, in reverse order - this internal fight for his memories constitutes the bulk of the film. Then, the following day, Joel and Clementine, both with memory erased, re-meet and re-connect, ending in "the best fucking night of my entire fucking life" Even the description is significant as this superlative profanity (in a film that uses it sparingly) replaces the "nice" that he used the first time around. At the forty-eight hour mark they find the documents of their erased history but nevertheless decide to re-start a relationship - they have indeed survived the vicissitudes of day and night.

We see these events achronologically, and with a number of repetitions that stress the changes that occur in our perception of the world once we have memories to invest in objects. Especially under the tutelage of Kaufman, Gondry's world is a lyrical but metaphysically claustrophobic heath-robinson construction. A chain of events leads to an unexpected conclusion, but that conclusion brings us, like the ourobouros back to the beginning of things. This recalls Gondry's video for Kylie Minogue's "Come Into My World" where the singer continuously circles a small Parisian neighbourhood except that with each circuit the personnel are not just replaced, but augmented: there are two Kylies, then three, two rowing couples, then three, two jumping boys in green, then three, and an ever increasing plethora of wheeled vehicles. As we meet Kylie, she drops a package and every subsequent Kylie picks up the package of the one before - a beautifully realized manifestation of the nature of memory and how we recover the events that we had for gotten by revisiting them.

Film depends on our framing of reality, and our reality itself is delimited by the frame of our experience. The frame that we present to the world is conditioned by our judgments which are in a constant state of flux and development. Gondry has chosen to play with the conventions of framing in the past; his video for the one-hit wonder Lucas reflects the energy and continuity of a rap track that relies on a number of samples from swing tracks. The video for "Lucas with the Lid Off" uses a black cardboard frame with live action, projected action, and trick scenery all interacting with one another. At each location, the camera stops and films what it sees, pausing with the actual black cardboard frame contiguous with the shot long enough for a passage of action before moving onwards once more At the end, the shot we see of Lucas mixing male and female vocals is different from the apparently identical shot we see at the beginning because we have met the characters whose images and voices are being mixed. Moreover, we have seen their relation to the mixer. This relationship is what frames the perception and composes the frame.

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