The Components of Love

Sophie and Georg meet and fall in love just after the heavily-pregnant Sophie has been abandoned by her boyfriend. To the newly born Jakob, Georg naturally becomes his father. The patchwork family faces all the usual challenges that beset modern parents: who should be allowed to work and who should take care of the child? How much freedom is permissible and how much self-sacrifice required? And where is the room for passion? A few years later, Georg and Sophie have split up. Jakob is six years old and his parents are grimly battling for custody. Sophie’s new partner, of all people, tries to mediate between them. Played out in a series of individual scenes that all take place outside the same front door in Berlin, the film is an elliptical portrait of a family for whom the term 'patchwork' is simply a part of their everyday lives. The protagonists negotiate their anxieties and desires in front of house walls, in-between pillars and in car parks. Here, home is not a safe harbour, but a place of transit exposed to the wind. A laconic look at the unreasonable mundanity of love. (Berlinale)