Clementine Kruczynski

Clementine is an unusual name, and almost in a bid to appear worthy of such a rare moniker, she engineers a persona to match. She dies her hair crazy colours and wears some truly awful clothes, but it’s all superficial.

When she first meets Joel (Jim Carrey) the man she will fall in love with, she seeks to inform him of her kookiness in a typically self-deprecating way, as though she can’t help being so goddamned crazy: “Look, I'm sorry if I came off a little nutso, I'm not really.” Joel sees through this and let’s her know it, but though she complains that “guys think I’m a concept”, it is actually a myth that she looks to maintain. She wants to be considered eccentric and weird, as it as her opportunity to be special.

Despite claims to the contrary, she does care what the world thinks of her and it is this huge internal contradiction that ironically, helps make Clementine so appealing. She quizzes Joel if she is ugly – a silly question considering he is her boyfriend by this stage, and yet she desperately needs to hear his answer. She can act tough, shouting the house down and swearing like a trooper, but she is also fragile and riddled with insecurities. These opposites are often packaged together, but unusually, Clementine never looks to suppress them. She is open about her personal issues and happily tells Joel that “I'm an open book. I tell you everything, every damn, embarrassing thing.”

It is her faults and her honest acceptance of these that make us like her all the more. She is ridiculously fickle, has the attention span of a small child and is high-maintenance, and yet these are all traits that she admits to and never looks to change. The hair and wacky clothes might be one way she tries to express her personality, but her true self always shines through, never to be denied. She is self-aware and confident in her limitations, but this inner knowledge of her lesser qualities never makes her withdrawn, apologetic or sad. Instead, she opts to be the life and soul of every party.

“I apply my personality in a paste” she cheerily declares, and though the film focuses more on the story of Joel, it is Clementine who makes the biggest impression. Kate Winslet’s performance as Clementine was voted one of the greatest of all time by Premiere magazine, and it would be churlish to argue. Clementine is noisy and cheery, smiling her way through the film as someone you feel you could know. She is approachable and chatty, so friendly in fact that it is due to her randomly introducing herself to Joel on a train, that their romance begins. When their relationship turns sour, Joel complains that “constantly talking isn't necessarily communicating”, but it is her extroverted exuberance that colours the entire film.

But talk of contradictions, honesty and pushiness suggest a down-to-earth character very much mired in reality. This would be wrong. Clementine is whimsical, romantic and impulsive (Joel: “That's what I love about you”), with a luminous childlike wonder, most evident when the circus unexpectedly comes to town. When she desperately tries to recreate the magic she once felt with Joel, with new man Patrick, she wants to go dancing one moment and then visit the frozen Charles the next.

Clementine injects fun into Joel’s humdrum existence and despite denouncing herself as “just a f**ked-up girl who's lookin' for my own piece of mind”, we come to love her – faults and all.