The Components of Love
(Miriam Bliese)

This is the worst kind of debut feature. It’s innocuous and passionless.  It’s averse to risk and exists as a bland recount of a past relationship, too afraid to peel back and look at something ugly. It gets cute when I wanted it to be blunt. So more or less: it’s not what I wanted. But for those looking for a fluffy distraction, Miriam Bliese’s debut feature The Components of Love is your ticket. It’s a film that recounts the ebb and flow of a relationship, a relationship that stems from a patchwork family and finds it building toward a custody battle. Its framework is akin to films like Marc Webb’s (500) Days of Summer or more recently, Tom Cullen’s Pink Wall, where the highs and lows of a relationship are framed elliptically. But it rarely utilizes that framework in an effective or persuasive way. The film is clearly confined to a budget, and for what it’s worth, Bliese maximizes her locale effectively (a party sequence early in the film provides an insightful and playful way of exploring the milieu’s architecture). But the crux of this narrative, the one that hangs on the importance of a relationship and how it shapes the child at its center, is never examined with much thought. It’s a hollow exercise, anemic in its observations, and stripped of curiosity.