Tenor Aaron Blake, tenor Rodell Rosel and bass-baritone Philip Cokorinos with Leon Botstein conducting. Photo: Matt Dine

Charlie Kaufman’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind takes its title from Alexander Pope’s “Eloisa to Abelard”: “How happy is the blameless vestal’s lot! The world forgetting, by the world forgot. Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind! Each pray’r accepted, each wish resigned.” That quote came to mind as I made my way back into the city after seeing Bohuslav Martinů’s Julietta at Bard’s SummerScape festival. Kaufman’s brilliant film makes the case for the importance of painful memories, even those we might long to forget, to our very humanity, while interrogating the nature of memory itself. Julietta asks similar questions and, like Kaufman but long before him, locates its inquiry in the surreal.

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In search of a girl whose voice he heard three years earlier, Michel returns to the seaside setting of his encounter, only to find that the townspeople have lost their memories and now live in an eternal present. The townspeople range from goofy to sinister—there’s a town commissioner who describes the “echo machines” that exist on every corner of the street, a fortune teller who predicts the past, a man selling memories to anyone willing to pay—and all of them only befuddle poor Michel. The town cannot remember, so the townspeople place a high value on any memories they can latch on to; Michel is briefly crowned Captain of the Town (before everyone forgets again) by virtue of being the only person able to recall a childhood toy. The audience oohs and ahhhs rapturously at the memory, as........

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