Ah, life after college. The beginning of self-sufficiency, of “real world” otherness. The ultimate unknown. It’s every college student’s worst nightmare and most anticipated dream. And it’s the focus of Tiny Furniture, up-and-coming writer/director Lena Dunham’s newest feature film.
Tiny Furniture centers on Aura (Dunham), a recent college graduate like many college graduates these days, is at a loss for what to do next.
Her long-time boyfriend broke up with her at the beginning of the summer, throwing all her plans into disarray and forcing her to return home to New York City.
Alone, jobless and wielding not much more than a film studies degree and a few artsy YouTube videos, Aura moves back into the TriBeCa loft she shares with her mother, Siri (Laurie Simmons), an artist specializing in photos of miniature furniture, and her sister Nadine, a precocious, uber-ambitious high school student.
Aura tiptoes into the post-grad world with uncertainty and a sort of passive, paralyzed angst. She reconnects with a wild childhood friend (Jemima Kirke), and picks up a minimum-wage gig as a day hostess at a nearby restaurant.
She also tries to scrounge up relationships with two childish, emotionally unavailable men, one a freeloading YouTube quasi-star (Alex Karpovsky) who camps out in her apartment until Siri finally kicks him out, the other a sous-chef (David Call) who solicits Aura for Vicodin and vents to her about his turbulent relationship with his girlfriend.
Aura also fights with her mother and sister over space and her lack of it, frets about the future, and wonders whether everyone else has felt the same pressure and ambivalence as she feels — all done, of course, with a good dose of sharp-witted humor and sly self-deprecation.
A lot of films, some good, some bad, have been made about first forays into the wicked world outside university gates — 2009’s atrocious Post-Grad, starring Alexis Bledel is an example of the latter, with 1967’s The Graduate as a prime example of the former — but Tiny Furniture steers clear of the “but I just want to find myself” clichés that many other après-graduation films often embrace.
Well, actually, the clichés are there because, after all, Aura is just as lost and aimless as all the other cinematic post-grads; the difference is they aren’t sappy or too in your face.
Rather, all of Aura’s ambivalence and sense of paralysis and suffocation feel utterly real.
The thing about Tiny Furniture that trumps some of these other post-grad romps is that, well, it’s kind of real. A life imitating art imitating life kind of real.
Simmons, an acclaimed photo artist, is Dunham’s real-life mother, Nadine is Dunham’s real-life sister, and the TriBeCa loft that serves as Aura’s childhood home/post-college semi-prison is Dunham’s parents’ real apartment.
The parallels between Aura’s life and Dunham’s don’t stop there. Aura graduates from an unnamed Midwestern college in Ohio with a degree in film studies; Dunham graduated from Oberlin College in Ohio with a degree in Creative Writing a few years ago.
The blurred lines between fact and fiction also call into question the kind of film Tiny Furniture aims to be.
Is it an art piece showing an audience semi-voyeuristic slivers of an actual person’s daily life? Or is it a film about a fictional character drawn from real life whose story the writer wanted told?
But what the casting, writing and setting do, regardless of Dunham’s artistic intention, is create an air of authenticity with the characters and their relationships with one another.
The relationship between Aura and Nadine, for instance, feels on point; a scene in which the two fight at an apartment party Nadine throws at the loft is particularly realistic, biting and perfect.
In addition to the familial relationships, Dunham’s writing is witty, clever and captivating. She unwinds Aura’s tale slowly, spooling the character out until there’s not one blemish left to hide, but never once leaving her unsympathetic.
There are some moments in Tiny Furniture that drag on, especially during the film’s second half, and some of the performances — particularly Simmons’s and surprisingly, Dunham’s — felt pretty stiff. But overall, it’s definitely a worthwhile experiment.
