Tiny Furniture

We live in a DIY culture, where filmmakers graduate from fancy-shmancy schools and think they can just make a film about themselves and call it art. Exhibit A (or Exhibit Gazillion): Lena Dunham's Tiny Furniture (2010). A glorified home movie. Tiny Furniture tells the story of recent college grad, Aura (Lena Dunham, who also wrote and directed the film), who must deal with the transition from alternative, lazy student to an actual full-grown woman. Post- grad confusion constantly pedals itself across independent cinema, and frankly, I'm sick of it. The narrative is rather dull, but this isn't anything out of the ordinary for mumblecore. However, I do admire Lena Dunham and her character as Aura (where she is essentially playing herself). She may not be anything special, but she's real. She's accurate—naïve, narcissistic, and completely disoriented. Ultimately, I think that's why this film (amongst other post-grad films) is so successful. It's built for a certain demographic—post-grad losers. They (We) find these movies comforting because the lost characters are just like them (us). I'm not going to say I didn't enjoy this movie, but I probably wouldn't have hadn't I found it extremely relatable to my current lifestyle. Hopefully, this film will work as a serious reality-check for those of us graduating soon. I don't want to be Aura. That's for sure. Aside from its tired plot, Lena Dunham actually has a great visual eye and hopefully this will reflect in her future work, when she isn't delving into self-exploitation any longer.

Certainly this film will not be everyone's cup of tea. But I'm a sucker for movies that are light on plot and heavy on letting us just hang out with some interesting characters for awhile. The dialogue here is so natural I thought perhaps they were simply ad libbing. The chemistry between the mother and daughters is totally real (makes sense -- they are a real family), and the film perfectly captures the that feeling of lacking any direction following graduation from college. It's true that nothing much happens in the film -- it's more about the nature of relationships: renewing old ones, letting friends go, trying out new lovers, choosing the wrong people -- all while trying to figure out what it means to be an adult.

An interesting aspect of young Lena Dunham's feature is that some of the most favorable reviews and interviews never mention the word "Mumblecore." There has to be a reason for that. If Tiny Furniture is annoying, it may be because it's smoother than most Mumblecore movies and that only brings out the laziness, the unambitious self-satisfaction of the genre/school/orientation of the young educated white Americans who've turned on their digital cameras and gained encouragement, or been called cool, for their DIY efforts to make feature films about themselves, which is to say, about nothing much. Tiny Furniture is Mumblecore that's suave enough to make you wonder why there isn't more to it. The clumsiness of other work of this generation makes one think there's something (maybe just raw "reality") behind it. Polish and self-possession in this director makes one suspect "reality" isn't all that interesting sometimes. Would anybody but film students and a tiny demographic find solace or food for thought in this picture? Tiny Furniture's protagonist, Lena herself, has just finished college and returns to the (admittedly somewhat chilly) "womb" of her highly successful mom's and self-confident teenage sister's big, all-white, hi-tech Tribeca loft. Dunham may be called Aura in the film instead of Lena (a name NY Times critic Manohla Dargis weaves a fancy critical-theory explanation for), but -- what is mildly unusual, but not very -- the filmmaker/actress managed to cast her own successful artist mother Laurie Simmons as Aura's mom and and her self-confident sister Grace Dunham as Aura's sister Nadine, and set much of the action in her mom's actual home. Not too much of a stretch there. Aura gets a job as a hostess at a restaurant around the corner and consorts with two freeloader would-be boyfriends: Keith (David Call), a sou-chef who cadges drugs off her and has sex with her in a pipe, and Jed (Alex Karpofsky, a Mumblecore regular, here an cutesy YouTuber and insufferable person) who only wants a place to sleep, and gets it, till Aura's mother comes back from a trip.

A positive aspect of Tiny Furniture (the title presumably refers to Aura's and Lena's mom's post-feminist photographic artwork about female roles) is that if it's sluggish and meandering, it's also good-natured. Mom and sis nudge Aura for taking up space and not doing much, but they're still friendly and polite, and Siri (Simmons' name here) tells Aura this is her home and is even kind enough to assure her she is probably going to become much more successful than she herself is. (A little research reveals that Lena Dunham's father, Carroll Dunham, is a successful artist himself; he did not, however, consent to "act" here.) Perhaps looking for signs of earlier doubts despite the current maternal success, Aura finds her mother's journals from when she was her age and reads them (and doubt she does indeed find there). Her mother doesn't mind this snooping.

Another feature that you may or may not like is Dunham's penchant for disrobing for the camera, showing her pear shape and small breasts without shame (as she should: there's nothing wrong with how she looks), and walking around the loft clad in T-shirt without pants. Aura just got a degree in Film Theory, again doubtless true, though the alma mater, Obrerlin, isn't plugged.

The material is Mumblecore, but the people don't mumble. Dunham favors articulate, unhesitant speech. She even indulges in a witty former best friend with good looks and an English accent, the drug-hoovering, wine-gulping and quite entertaining Charlotte (Jemima Kirke). If all the characters were like Charlotte, and Nadine's misbehaving preppie pals got to speck at their party, this might have a remote chance of approaching the sophistication of Whit Stillman's (1990) Metropolitan. But Metropolitan is about social life and Tiny Furniture is just about a self-absorbed young woman who never leaves the neighborhood.

Dunham's film has been acclaimed at the South by Southwest Festival (an ideal venue, to which it was granted late admission), then gotten generally favorable reviews and interviews in the NY Times and The New Yorker. I've given Mumblecore my time and my attention, but now I begin to wonder, if this is the template talented beginners are going to follow. Is there nothing better? This film made me badly need to see a HongKong gangster movie. If the depths of genre seem to offer more for the imagination and the heart to contemplate, something must be off.

This film is essentially about a young college graduate trying to figure out what she wants to do with her life. The fact that, throughout the movie, things only get more confusing for her, only adds to the realism of the film. I have read some reviews where people claim the movie is TOO pointless, or too confusing, or just generally lacking something. I understand this position, but to the people who think this, I kind of feel like they are taking the place of Aura's mother when Aura says to her mom "you never listen to me". This is a movie that requires you to heavily invest in the characters, so if you dislike them immediately, you will probably not like this movie, either.

Aura is a great character, one of the most realistic characters I have seen in a while. Even though I am a male, and am nowhere near her level of wealth nor as self-depressed, I am around her age and I could surprisingly still easily relate to her. Mostly because the time when you define yourself seems so important, and yet it is mostly a time where not a lot happens. Despite her 'hard time' she is still generally upbeat and curious towards everything, because I believe her character wants to believe, like her mother says, "your 20s don't matter that much...I never think about the past".

She is, however, a very vapid character. She tends to choose the wrong people to hang out with, and she is somewhat weak (I mean, she moans the whole movie that no one cares, but the one friend who truly does, she basically shafts). Yet, she is likable because she has flaws and she embraces them. We rarely see her in fits of emo pity; instead we see an intelligent, very funny young woman simply trying to escape the shadows of her family and overcome the awkwardness of young adulthood.

There are flaws here, but the writing was amazing (despite a lack of plot) - the dialogue is realistic and often hilarious. The composition of shots is brilliant, and the apartment's white walls draw beautiful contrast in certain shots. And the acting was stellar considering the indie nature and family sourcing which Dunham used to make the film.

It is not perfect, but it was an enjoyable experience, and I can imagine it only gets better with repeat viewings...since you know what to expect, you can focus more on the 'tiny' details that truly make up the triumph of the film.

Written and directed by Lena Dunham, who also acted the part of the lead character, Aura, "Tiny Furniture" is a worthy accomplishment for a variety of reasons. Most importantly - with a budget of $50K - it demonstrates the production quality that can be achieved with minimal funds and a skeleton crew. The film tells the story of a young woman, just graduated from from film studies at Oberlin and upset over a recent romantic break-up, who returns to her artist mother's Tribeca apartment in New York where a younger sister also resides. Even if the storyline is seriously thin, the result is a witty look at the supposedly crucial dilemmas of an immature, privileged, self-absorbed female college graduate who finds herself on the threshold of adulthood. Coincidentally (or probably not) this narrative framework mirrored Ms Dunham's real-life circumstances at the time when she made the film - and she utilized her own mother, sister and friends to play their respective parts in this fictionalized version of her homecoming.

The film leads us through a sequence of Aura's everyday issues that she consistently turns into minor melodramas. These include communication issues with her mother, free-loading boyfriends, infantile sibling rivalry confrontations, employment problems and humiliating sexual misadventures - all of which are portrayed with a mixture of ironic humor and pathos. "Tiny Furniture" is beautifully photographed on a Canon Digital SLR, and the entire cast give appropriately cosmopolitan performances, with Jemima Kirke stealing the show as Aura's hilariously out-to-lunch BFF Charlotte.