Lena Dunham's TINY FURNITURE

Tiny Furniture is a 2010 independent comedy drama written by, directed by and starring Lena Dunham. The film also stars Dunham's mother and sister as her on screen mother and sibling. Also featured are Jemima Kirke and Alex Karpovsky, who would later become known through the series GIRLS, also written by Dunham.

The film is about Aura, a girl, who returns from college with a useless degree, and who struggles to find her place in the world she discovers upon returning home. She meets a series of old and new friends and she falls back into a life of despondency and discovers a hopeless lack of self definition. The film marks Dunham's screenwriting debut, and is surprisingly strong for a first film, the film is set and was filmed around manhattan, mostly in TriBeCa on digital cameras for a microbudget of 65 thousand dollars, and this film is a good example of the effectiveness of digital cameras in allowing no budget movies to be made.

The film is essentially a precursor to GIRLS, and features the same themes and in most cases characters as the HBO series, the character of Aura is essentially Hannah Horvath in another form, just as insecure and just as deluded. Kirke's character of Charlotte is almost a carbon copy of Jessa Johnsson, bohemian and spiritually free. Only Karpovsky's character is at all different to it's counterpart in GIRLS. The film is essentially Lena Dunham wrestling with the same ideas and concepts that are discussed in GIRLS, it's about someone struggling to define themselves and find their place in the world, and taking terrible advice from their friends and lovers. The film, like GIRLS is also about the offspring of affluent middle class parents feeling entitled, yet feeling like they aren't allowed to complain about the shittiness of their situation.

The film does have it's flaws, it can feel a little meandering and pedestrian, and the characters can feel a little underdeveloped, with many of the supporting characters feeling like little more than cardboard cutouts, and serving like little more than markers to carry the story along. Despite it's flaws, Tiny Furniture features some top notch performances from it's leads and as always shows Lena Dunham as a writer with a real point of view. Rating: B-

Aura: I just got off a plane from Ohio. I am in a post-graduate delirium.