After years of trying to make their relationship to function smoothly, Joel finds that his long-time girlfriend, Clementine, has undergone a psychiatrist's experimental operation in which all of her memories of Joel have been erased. Frustrated by the prospect of continuously being in love with a woman who has no recollection of their time together, Joel decides to have his memories of Clementine erased as well. The film follows Joel's recollections of Clementine backwards in time as each current memory is changed, and the technique then moves on to the preceding one, which is also shown, and subsequently deleted. However, after the process begins, Joel decides he doesn't want to forget Clementine, so he begins smuggling her into regions of his memory where she doesn't belong, altering other aspects of his recollections in the process.
The film's cinematography is remarkably similar to the techniques used to create a documentary. The camera angles and images have a documentary feel to them, and there is a lot of hand held camera work involved. The shifts in focus are evident and purposeful in this scenario, as Gondry controls this sort of camera work to give it a documentary air. In this film, the camera frequently pulls emphasis from one character to another. For example, Clementine is in the center and Joel is in the background while the camera pulls focus from Clementine to Joel.The rationale for this is to depict the distortion and degeneration of Joel's memory. Certain pictures are out of focus, such as things and people in front of Joel. In the moment where Joel is left alone on the iced-over lake, crane views are employed to show him staring up at the sky and praying for the treatment to finish. This high long view emphasizes Joel's insignificance in comparison to everything else in the scene, and how hard it is for him to stop the operation merely by yelling into the sky. It also represents his sense of isolation, as he is left behind as everything around him dies.
Her actions resulted in physical injuries in a way that her successors' narrative lines did not. Her rough-around-the-edges look was designed to demonstrate her carelessness rather than to foreshadow a romantic narrative about how she eventually fell in love. She even went so far as to shut down the "stereotype" before it was ever created: "Too many guys think I'm a concept, or I complete them, or I'm gonna make them alive. But I'm just a f*cked-up girl who's looking for my own peace of mind. Don't assign me yours." It's odd because the film accomplished precisely what Clementine objected against. Female characters who are quirky, intriguing, and adventurous are unquestionably important. We identify with characters because we can relate to them as complex, emotional individuals, and we take little away from films that portray them as nothing more than emotionless characters.
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