T wo lovers, Joel (Jim Carrey) and Clementine (Kate Winslet), opt to have their memories of each other erased after a painful breakup, only to meet and fall in love once more. Michel Gondry’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, which celebrates its 15th anniversary this week, is filled with so many surreal delights that its story can be easily mistaken for the stuff of dreams. But there are hard truths at its centre – the kind we may not even want to hear, even if we know it’s good for us.

Thanks to its screenplay by the master of existential despair, Charlie Kaufman, Eternal Sunshine’s reputation has only grown in the passing years. Produced on a budget of $20m (£15m), the film was released in US cinemas in 2004 and earned an impressive $72m at the worldwide box office, alongside an Oscar nomination for Winslet and an Oscar win for screenwriters Kaufman, Gondry and Pierre Bismuth. When the venerable film critic Roger Ebert revisited the film in 2010, he added an extra half star to his rating in order to award it full marks, noting: “Why I respond so intensely to this material must involve my obsession with who we are and who we think we are.” It’s now generally considered one of the best films of the century.

Indeed, time has only deepened the emotional effects of Eternal Sunshine. The more we revisit it, the more we can look beyond the dazzling effects of how the story’s told, as we travel backwards through Joel’s memories. Gondry relies heavily on practical effects in order to depict Joel’s memories collapsing in on themselves – there are featureless faces, disappearing people and cars falling from the sky. Yet it’s not all whimsy for the sake of it. Eternal Sunshine uses the landscape of Joel’s mind to build a perfect portrait of heartbreak, by reminding us that we can only look back on our past relationships through the prism of our memories. And that those memories can be fickle, inconsistent things.

Pain and despair always seem to overshadow the more delicate, gentle feelings of joy. After a breakup, it’s so often the arguments, the tears, and the frustrations that all come flooding back. We can sometimes forget why we ever fell in love in the first place. Could it have simply been that love was making us blind to the reality of this person? “Too many guys think I’m a concept,” Clementine warns Joel early on in their relationship. “I’m just a f**ked up girl who is looking for my own peace of mind.” It makes no difference. He still convinces himself that she’ll save his life.

The 20 best romantic films ever made Show all 20 1 /20 The 20 best romantic films ever made The 20 best romantic films ever made Phantom Thread (2017) Phantom Thread has all the trappings of a conventional period romance. Daniel Day-Lewis plays Reynolds Woodcock, a famous dressmaker who falls in love with Alma (Vicky Krieps), a waitress who later becomes his muse. Paul Thomas Anderson’s twisted romance flies off in some psychologically dark and unexpected directions, but the arc is that of a storybook love affair, of two people taking extraordinary measures to hold onto the one they love. Universal Pictures The 20 best romantic films ever made A Star is Born (1954) Bradley Cooper and Lady Gaga scored big at the box office with last year’s A Star is Born remake, but for many, the definitive version was released nearly 65 years earlier. 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StudioCanal The 20 best romantic films ever made Amélie (2001) The highest-grossing French-language film of all time in the US, Amélie is a modern-day fairy-tale about a socially maladjusted young woman who decides to dedicate her life to impishly and secretly helping others. The film leans into the tweeness of its premise, as well as the romance of its Parisian setting, to build a gradual love story that’s straight from the heart. It’s not all sweetness, however, and some of the more world-weary touches – such as Amélie’s lover working in a sex shop – help give the film some sharp edges, and a comic bite. Fox Distribution The 20 best romantic films ever made Brokeback Mountain (2005) Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain stars Jake Gyllenhaal and Heath Ledger as two sheep herders who go through a turbulent but passionate romance. The film’s open and unapologetic depiction of sex and queer relationships made it a landmark release for LGBT representation in mainstream cinema. Focus Features The 20 best romantic films ever made It Happened One Night (1934) Directed by Frank Capra, master of the feel-good film, It Happened One Night mixes screwball comedy with heartfelt romance. Claudette Colbert plays a wealthy socialite who decides to slum it with an abrasive but charismatic news reporter, played by Clark Gable. One of only three films to ever win all five major Oscars (Best Picture, Director, Actor, Actress and Screenplay), It Happened One Night endures as the gold standard for a classical Hollywood romcom. Columbia Pictures The 20 best romantic films ever made Call Me by Your Name (2017) Set in an Edenic villa “somewhere in Northern Italy”, Call Me by Your Name tells the story of Elio (Timothée Chalamet), a smart but directionless 17-year-old who falls in love with his father’s research assistant Oliver (Armie Hammer). 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Columbia Pictures The 20 best romantic films ever made Moonlight (2016) 2016 Best Picture winner Moonlight is a radical film: a queer romance with an all-black cast that captures a boy’s coming-of-age with heart-wrenching specificity. Chiron, the protagonist, is played by three actors across three chapters of his life – and the third act, in which an adult Chiron (Trevante Rhodes) reconnects with an old flame, is one of the most heart-rending in modern cinema. Writer-director Barry Jenkins showed himself to have a poet’s ear for dialogue and James Laxton’s camerawork perfectly captures the vibrancy and the physicality of romantic attraction. A24 The 20 best romantic films ever made In the Mood for Love (2000) One of the most acclaimed pieces of Asian cinema of all time, In the Mood for Love is a masterful study in love behind closed doors, tracking the emotional affair between two people who realise their spouses are having an affair together. 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Gondry’s film offers us the tantalising image of a clean break. It imagines a world where we could shed ourselves of the past and simply start again. The film’s title, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, recalls the work of Alexander Pope. In his 1717 poem “Eloisa to Abelard”, he writes: “How happy is the blameless vestal’s lot!/ The world forgetting, by the world forgot./ Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind!” To forget can be a kind of freedom. Yet, while Eternal Sunshine is cynical enough to indulge in this mentality for much of its running time – portraying relationships as inevitably shrouded by emotional baggage – it also challenges us to question why we allow ourselves to be so ruled by our emotional scars.

After Joel makes a visit to Dr Howard Mierzwiak (Tom Wilkinson) of Lacuna, Inc – an institution set up specifically to erase the things that have become too painful to remember – we start the process of systematic deletion. The first memory to go is the moment the relationship crumbled. After Clementine arrives home late and drunk (again), Joel accuses her of infidelity, claiming sex is the only way she can get people to like her. This memory is the most vivid. The camera frantically follows Clementine as she packs up her belongings. Joel had simply come to assume Clementine will get drunk and act recklessly. She feels like she might as well live up to the expectation.

Past that, we travel back to the boredom stage, where Joel ponders whether their restaurant date rituals have reduced them to “the dining dead”. It’s only until we scroll all the way back to the honeymoon period of the relationship that Joel starts to have second thoughts about the mind-wiping process. As we witness the simple, isolated image of Joel and Clementine lying together on a frozen lake, looking up at the stars, he’s reminded of how things once were.

The sentiment hits home when Joel and Clementine meet for a second time, after their memories have been wiped. A heartbroken, disgruntled employee of Lacuna, Inc finds them and hands them both a tape of their sessions at the company, in which they speak frankly about their relationship and why they decided to have the process done. The Joel and Clementine of today can’t quite believe what they’re hearing. In the tapes, she says: “He changed me. I don’t like myself anymore.” The moment they spent together on the frozen lake may as well never have existed. He claims her compulsion to change hair colour is “all bulls***”. All that the Joel of today can do is sheepishly retort: “I like your hair.” That something so trivial as someone’s hair colour could feel romantic one day, ridiculous the next shows how far the pain of their breakup has fundamentally changed how they see each other. These are two versions of the same people, looking at each other through two different perspectives.

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind trailer

Yet, in all of Joel and Clementine’s misery, the film offers us one hope: what would happen if we embraced heartbreak, instead of fearing it? Why do we always see it as a loss to be grieved? What if we accepted it simply as a part of who we are?