Director Michel Gondry, whose specialty in music videos is a seamless visual blending of reality and surreality, was the perfect filmmaker for this thoughtful, provoking drama which juggles the past and present. Jim Carrey is excellent as a single man looking for love...and perhaps finding it with eccentric clerk Kate Winslet; unfortunately, a double-header secret from both their pasts may come back to haunt them. Gondry, who also worked on the original story with Pierre Bismuth and screenwriter Charlie Kaufman, is masterful with a flashy scenario (both figuratively and literally), and he works surprisingly well with his eclectic group of actors. However, the characters in Kaufman's script aren't especially likable (particularly Winslet's argumentative love-interest) and the film is acutely chilly, with everybody bundled up and shivering. As the plot thickens, it also becomes convoluted (and, purposely one assumes, splintered). Despite these missteps, Gondry steers viewers nimbly through the mechanisms of the narrative, and there several engaging and arresting sequences. Similar in tone and spirit to "Being John Malkovich", which Kaufman also wrote, and blazing with deft, daring originality. **1/2 from ****