Review of Tiny Furniture (2010) by Manny C — 23 Jan 2011

I may not be able to enjoy Sundance this week, but at least I can still see films via other outlets that showcase exciting new voices in film making. Lena Dunham, the gifted writer-director and star of Tiny Furniture, is just such a voice. Tiny Furniture, made with a shoestring budget of $25,000, is a comedy of shocking and touching gravity that is loaded with nuance and detail. Dunham, a recent graduate of Oberlin College in Ohio, is Aura, who is....also a recent graduate from college in Ohio. Aura is now living in a beautiful white loft in Tribeca, a place owned by her mother, Siri, a photo-artist. Siri is also played by Dunham's real life mother Laurie Simmons, a photo-artist. Siri takes dolls and tiny furniture pieces and sets them against human body parts. What results are images that are arresting in their psychological resonances. So is the film. The names are different, but no one is being protected in this amazingly hypnotic film, shot with a poet's eye by Jody Lee Lipes.

Dunham doesn't go easy on herself either. Aura considers herself a total underachiever, a person without purpose surrounded by many who have purpose. She lives with her mother and her younger sister, Nadine, a poet played by Lena's prize-winning poet sister Grace Dunham. Their conflicted feelings for one another is palpable and deeply felt. Aura's main source of comfort is from her childhood friend Charlotte (Jemima Kirke, lovely), who sets Aura up with a job taking reservations at a hip neighborhood restaurant. It's at that restaurant that Aura meets Keith (David Call), a sous chef who solicits Vicodin and sex from her. But Aura also finds herself attracted to Jed (Alex Karpovsky, well-known in the mumblecore scene), who crashes at the loft and talks of possibly taking his Youtube video series, in which he portrays The Nietzschean Cowboy, to Comedy Central. Basically, the men in this film are straight up asses, and Dunham does her share of having laughs at their expense, when she's not being hurt by them, but most powerfully when she is. The world of art is also skewered, but not so much that Dunham portrays an aura (ha) of superiority. Not when she shares her own undergrad video that features her average body in a bikini. It's a brutally naked, raw and scathing indictment of skinny culture.

There's a point where her friend Charlotte invites Aura to her house to drop some Ambien and watch Picnic at Hanging Rock. Sounds like a party to me. But Dunaham's main points of reference seem to be Woody Allen and Larry David. But her film's final scene sees Aura and her mother opening themselves to one another. The scene is a hodgepodge of verbal fireworks, but the silence that ends it is most deafening, as the two lie awake in the dark attempting to stay close. Sure, Tiny Furniture isn't a perfect movie, but it is a work of high ambition that is all too willing to fall flat on its face in a pile of failure. I can seldom think of better films to take in than that. Tiny Furniture, which took home the best narrative feature prize at SXSW, is a remarkable film that burrows under your skin. Lena Dunham is a name to remember.