transient sunshine

Caution: spoilers ahead.

It's been half a week since I saw Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and my relationship with the film has turned into the film's premise: I love it, I'm forgetting it, I've forgotten it, and when I see it again that initial love will return swiftly.
Memory, according to the film and current brain research, is an emotional process, which might explain Sunshine's transience. I found the film oddly touching, sweet, beautiful, inventive, but not especially passionate, given its subject matter. In Joel's last (or, really, first, since the erasure worked backwards) memory of Clementine, he was about to witness, in a sense, her death. But the script didn't convey any hysteria; it seemed to ask us to invest emotion in the idea of her disappearance, rather than experience the emotion via Joel's reactions to it.
But that's a small complaint, given how much this film was the type of film I long for. And, in some respect I wonder if what I'd label the film's one weakness isn't a necessary or at least highly probable weakness. In my opinion, the most interesting or appealing speculative (sci-fi) fiction turns theories of emotion into facts. Feelings are transformed into something tangible and obvious: a break-up, for example, becomes a memory-wipe. And, while this narrative technique can, in turn, inhibit -- or lessen the need -- for conventional displays of feeling on the part of the story's characters (my complaint), it also can flesh out feelings' structure and logic.*
After a one-sided break-up, we cry because of our partners' emotional amnesia, not their literal amnesia. But in making Clementine's shift in feeling literal, or 'factually' justified, Sunshine refines common observations on the pain of breaking-up. The pain is a mourning for ourselves as loved ones, and the memory-wipe makes that personal, subjective experience external and inarguable.
The doggedly human aspects of Sunshine's sci-fi work particularly well because the sci-fi, other than as metaphor, makes so little sense. High-budget films break their backs trying to explain the workings of crazy technology, but Sunshine never bothers making the memory-wipe seem plausible. The helmet Joel wears during the procedure is like the cardboard box a kid uses as a car. Whimsy and crudely aplied imagination are much more charming than seamless special effects. And, in some sense, we're more willing to go along with a crazy premise when it doesn't try so hard to convince us, so hard we feel obligated to resist it.
Sunshine has, as Anthony Lane put it in his review, an "unlovely elegance," a so-casual-it's-dirty beauty. It may not be a film for all eternity, but it is, in its best moments, as bright and warm as sunshine.

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*A good contrast/comparison to Sunshine is The Time Traveller's Wife: it's shoddily written and its sci-fi premise doesn't mirror and enlarge any aspects of human psychology. The premise's sole point, rather, is to enable a passionate love story.