Tiny Furniture
Lena Dunham, the writer and director of the new comedyTiny Furniture, puts her personal life up front and center by also appearing in the lead role of Aura, a recent, malaise-stricken graduate of Oberlin College who takes refuge at her mother's Tribeca apartment. Aura's mother, Siri, is played by Laurie Simmons, Dunham's mother; Aura's younger, keen sister, Nadine, is played by Grace Dunham, Dunham's younger sister. The Tribeca apartment, which serves as Dunham's chief setting, has been the family home of Simmons and her daughters for some time and remains the residence of the filmmaker following her own graduation from Oberlin, a break-up with a boyfriend and a return home to languid, post-college limbo.
This has all been the long way of saying that the narrative of Tiny Furniture, which took away top honors at this past SXSW Festival, is a minor trifle compared to the self-reflexive theatrics and the very personal humor that Dunham orchestrates. If her cinematic lineage weren't obvious enough, one of her most prominent characters is played by Alex Karpovsky, one of the stars of Andrew Bujalski's wonderful Beeswax, who is seen making his way through a Woody Allen novel throughout the film.
Aura meets Karpovsky's character, Jed, a smug YouTube celebrity known for videos with titles like "The Nietzschean Cowboy," at a house party not long after dropping her stuff off at home. Aura gets his info but fails to bed him on account of the appearance of Charlotte, her best friend before college, played by Jemima Kirke, Dunham's childhood friend. The self-appointed "Marianne Faithful of Tribeca," Charlotte clings to Aura immediately, offering her pills and a tip on a minimum-wage job as a day hostess for a local bistro. The introduction of a handsome sous-chef (David Call), who engages in bare-minimum conversation about "cum omelets" and Cormac McCarthy with her, only slightly complicates blundering attempts Aura makes to sleep with Jed when he begins crashing at her mother's apartment.
At romance, at intimate contact and even at mild groping, Aura is a magnificent disaster but this is the point. Dunham is in the business of severe, fearless self-deprecation and her best gags revolve around the fact that she does not possess a top-tier body nor is she a practiced student of seduction. (In a recent New Yorker piece, Dunham admitted to keeping a list of men she has slept in the same bed with, yet hasn't engaged in any sexual encounters with.) Men are portrayed as selfish assholes here but the female characters, though more plentiful, are just as frustrating, awkward and self-centered. One of the film's best scenes has Aura and Charlotte disturbing Nadine's party by walking around in their underwear; we are drawn in by Aura's boldness but then immediately embrace Nadine's anger towards her perceived desperation.
The hazy trajectory of her relationships with men fuel a great amount of the humor but they are ultimately secondary to the complex relationships Aura has with Nadine and, even more so, with Siri. Aesthetically, Aura couldn't be more out of place than when she stands next to her mother and sister but Dunham goes further by juxtaposing Nadine's national poetry award to the "buzz" Aura made with her YouTube shorts; the most memorable one, actually made by Dunham back in Oberlin, consists of her stripping down to a bikini and bathing in a fountain. Nadine's talent and Siri's artwork are approached with seriousness, so much so as to almost suggest deadpan; Aura's work is only celebrated by Charlotte, that is when Charlotte isn't dryly celebrating Aura in general.
Tiny Furniture is certainly a very personal film, and often a very funny one as well, but there is something too distanced about how it unfolds, too compartmentalized like the sliding shelves on the walls of the near-labyrinthine apartment. By the time Aura ends up in flagrante dilecto in an abandoned pipe, her confusion has become all-consuming but the aesthetic never conveys that the way Dunham's immense sense of humor does. Shot by Jody Lee Lipes on digital video, the sense of composition suggests Tati but Dunham's humor, though certainly tied to physicality, doesn't depend on open space and movement so closely. Her canvas is neither the bristling, cluttered office nor the imposing cityscape but rather the family bed, where her sister and mother sleep and she cloyingly awakens them to wonder if there is still room for her next to them.
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