WRITER Charlie Kaufman loves to play mind games, using cinema's potential to confuse and trick and puzzle in Being John Malkovich, Adaptation and now Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind.

You may have seen the TV advert, the jovial one that calls Michael Gondry's movie Eternal Sunshine and has you thinking it's another Jim Carrey comedy. Well, that's the first trick: the formerly irritating Jim is in serious mode and seriously good form: his best since Man On The Moon.

Weird title and all, Eternal Sunshine of The Spotless could start or end at any point: the film appears to fold in on itself. The more you try to understand it, the more it eludes you. Goodness knows what it must have been like for Carrey and his leading lady, Kate Winslet, who have happily admitted they were often confused during filming.

It opens with Jim Carrey's befuddled, nerdy Joel Barish getting out of bed, not on the wrong side, but out of the end, the first sign that there is nothing conventional going on here. On a whim he decides to take a train in the opposite direction to his workplace, whereupon he encounters a blue-haired bohemian by the name of Clementine (Winslet, better than usual, even if her hair colour keeps changing), who promptly tells him she will marry him.

Ah, if only it were that simple. The plot thickens as it is then revealed she has undergone a medical procedure to have all memories of Joel erased. He decides to do likewise, signing up for the pioneering methods of Dr Howard Mierzwiak (Tom Wilkinson) and his happy, preoccupied band of manic, stoned helpers (Kirsten Dunst, Elijah Wood, Mark Ruffalo).

Too late, he changes his mind but the process has kicked in, and he finds himself trapped inside his head, desperate to escape and save his memories as past and present merge in a surreal jumble.

Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind joins The Prisoner and Memento in revelling in trying to make sense of an addled mind. In doing so, it also acknowledges how the heart keeps re-writing the book of love, so that we never learn from our mistakes.

Updated: 16:41 Thursday, April 29, 2004