Tiny Furniture

Even before Tiny Furniture’s release, Judd Apatow recruited its writer-director to helm a pilot: It appears that, having chased after the collegiate zeitgeist in Undeclared, he’s now gone straight to the core (or mumblecore). With Tiny Furniture, 2008 Oberlin grad and celebrated short-film director Lena Dunham makes her first feature over 60 minutes. She casts herself as YouTube video artist Aura, a 22-year-old who graduates from college in Ohio and returns to the Tribeca apartment where she grew up (filmed in the actual apartment where Dunham grew up). Lena’s real-life mom and sister play Aura’s mom and sister, and so on.

Resisting an autobiographical reading would be futile in this context, and it’s Tiny Furniture’s aggressive, overweening solipsism—the movie is half-critical, half celebratory in its regard for Aura’s cutesy aimlessness—that’s its most intriguing and most frustrating quality. In a partly convincing portrait of romantic angst, Aura pines for a hipster asshole from Chicago; still, for those without similar predilections, it’s hard to believe she’d invite him to crash unrequitedly for a week. Aura’s borderline-anachronistic disregard for employment—she disinterestedly takes a hosting job in a nearby restaurant—might be hand-waved as critique (though as someone not far from Aura’s age bracket, let me suggest that even film majors spend some time thinking about income). A party-gone-awry sequence briefly offers a taste of the bitter, perceptive voice Dunham has: The handling of a sudden sisterly fight suggests she could be the next Andrew Bujalski if she ever leaves the house.

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