Tiny Furniture (2010)
Tiny Furniture (USA) Directed by Lena Dunham Written by Lena Dunham Starring Lena Dunham; Laurie Simmons; Grace Dunham; Alex Karpovsky; Jemima Kirke; Merritt Weaver; David Call( Keith); Amy Seimetz
Festival hit Tiny Furniture comes from twenty four year old writer/director Lena Durham, who also plays the lead, Aura, who has recently finished school at Oberlin (her real life Alma Mater) and returned to her family home (her real life family home) in Lower Manhattan/Tribeca, NYC. Though quantifying how the content of a piece according to its autobiographical details is usually a bad idea, doing so becomes virtually unavoidable when a writer/director also plays a lead character who happens to be a filmmaker, and casts immediate family members (real life artist mom Laurie Simmons as mom Siri; real life sister Grace as sister Nadine) in major supporting roles that are closely drawn versions of themselves.
Tiny Furniture (the name comes from the miniatures Siri works with), Dunham’s second feature, has a Mumblecore feel to it as many of the characters are young adults, the film was made cheaply (a micro budget featuring a Canon 7D), the focus is on dialogue, and plot-wise not a lot happens. There is also a level of self-absorption that has one drawing comparisons to the previously mentioned DYI string of films, but also filmmakers like Woody Allen, a writer/director/actor with whom Dunham shares a very New York, upper middle class aesthetic, and perhaps Chantel Akerman, an auteur who has also, to some extent, used herself as an object on film. Like Allen, there is a kind of personal neurotic, self-deprecation at work that combines with some exploratory stabs at the vagaries of intellectualism, the NYC art scene, and wealth. Like Akerman, Dunham plays with ideas about her own sexuality, daring to expose her physical form on camera. Because (as in Akerman’s case) Dunham doesn’t embody some traditional Hollywood notion of physical beauty, her choice is both brave, and, almost by default, embedded with some socio-sexual-political commentary (one echoed in her choice of art installation, which of course was an actual video she made in real life that enjoyed wide play on the internet).
Dunham (who is already involved in an HBO project with Jud Apatow) is a budding filmmaker with some ability in regard to performance as she uses a mix of experienced and inexperienced actors to relatively good effect. She also shows a steady hand when it comes to modulation, allowing what little drama there is to arise in small, effective moments, refusing to impose unnecessary plot or structure into what is essentially a meandering piece about a young woman reeling from a recent breakup of a long term college relationship, and attempting to find out how to begin her adulthood.
Aura comes back to a home that doesn’t seem to live up to her idealized version of it, feeling like she no longer fits in a place she still considers partly hers. She’s angry at her mother and sister’s self involvement, her mothers assistant’s free reign of the living section of the loft, and the restrictions imposed upon her by a new restaurant job and Siri’s rules regarding her comings and goings. She retreats into the arms of several ill-matched would be lovers, and an old/new friend Charlotte (Dunham’s real life pal, Jemima Clarke), while practically ignoring her schoolmate Frankie (Merritt Weaver), with whom she was scheduled to get an apartment with.
Dunham should be applauded on more than one front - her ability to maximize very limited and simply designed locations, her restraint in keeping the story small, her avoidance of cliche trap. All of these factors are aided by the overall underplaying of events in a kind of through-line of vague depression. With that said, in some ways the film’s strength is also its biggest weakness as the stakes do not ever seem high enough to fully compel us or demand our emotional investment.
As a character, Aura is neither overly likable nor abhorrent. While her sister, the slender, bespectacled Nadine, a star student who wins a national poetry prize (as she did in real life) is certainly vaguely annoying, obviously put out by her big sister’s arrival; the men she encounters - the sous chef (David Call), and fellow video maker Jed (Mumblecore vet Alex Karpovsky) fittingly callous and selfish; and Siri certainly focused on her own pursuits, it is difficult to muster tremendous sympathy for someone who seems to come from such a privileged background, and who presumably has plenty of time to go about making more mistakes before figuring it all out.
This is not to say that Tiny Furniture is without a recognizable sensibility or significant merit. Dunham’s voice is (perhaps naturally) very much a woman’s, and for all the accomplishments of the Mumblecore films there has not, to this point, been much from a female perspective. While the story also seems quite obviously a young person’s, this fact makes it no more or less valid than any other. In its best moments, Dunham manages to capture the essence of an uncertain human being clearly confused about what kind of person she will become. Her mistakes seem like the kind that people make at that age. As she tries to find solace in the cocoon of her family home, she is exasperated by the fact that her presence seems to barely register with Nadine and Siri, provoking annoyance and anger she can’t name, her inability to verbalize creating exponentially more distress.
Ultimately, clear visuals utilizing the new SLR technology, well cast supporting players - Clarke is a standout as the quirky faux-British accented rich girl, and an authentic feeling existential melancholia permeating a story as minimalist as Dunhams Mom’s loft, make Tiny Furniture a promising start to what might be an interesting film-making career.