South by Southwest has a long tradition of making stars. The Texan festival has been taking over Austin for 25 years now with past alumni making worldwide headlines. This, however, is the music festival – an A + R frenzy desperate to grab the next big thing and, while the likes of Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, The Arcade Fire and Odd Future have been thrust upon the gazing public to the point of being passé, the more recently founded film festival of the same name is yet to establish it’s breakout star. This was until 2010 when Tiny Furniture premiered and in doing so may have landed SXSW a bone-fide star in Lena Dunham. Its belated UK release no doubt a result of Dunham’s new HBO series Girls scheduled to be imminently broadcast, itself a signifier of her success, having been produced by the ever bankable Judd Apatow.
The more-than-semi autobiographical film sees Dunham’s character, Aura, arriving back at her New York childhood home having graduated from a film degree in Ohio and questioning what her next life step should be. It’s very much a pet-project for Dunham who casts her real life sister Grace in the role of Nadine and mum (celebrated artist Laurie Simmons) as Siri setting most of the film in her family’s real Brooklyn studio loft. The tiny furniture of the title is in reference to the scaled down photography for which her mother is famed and it is this intimate set-up into which we are invited.
The regression into a child-like mindset is near instant for Aura; arguing with her sister, huffing at chores and drinking her mums neatly positioned wine collection, culminating in a pitch-perfect teen outburst “I hate you! Leave me alone!”
Struggling to find her role in her newly re-acquired lifestyle, Aura takes a job as a restaurant hostess, a mundane role fulfilling nothing other than introducing her to Keith (David Call), a flirtatious chef with whom she quickly builds up a quasi-friendship ultimately leading to possibly the least romantic sex-scene in film so far complete with great muted realisation “It was in a pipe. On a street.” She juggles this with other relationships including Jed (Alex Karpovsky) an ‘artist’ who she takes in while her family are away, her mothers surprise made greater when she finds out they aren’t more of an item. They meet at a party where Aura also bumps into an old childhood friend, the draining Charlotte (Jemima Kirke) whose constant craving for entertainment and demanding friendship damages the one Aura built up at college with Frankie (Nurse Jackie starring Merritt Wever).
An obvious influence and one with which Tiny Furniture shares far more than a nod to is the Mumblecore movement of the past decade. The lo-fi scene pioneered by the likes of Mark Duplass (Humpday, Hannah takes the Stairs) and Andrew Bujalski (Funny Ha Ha, Beeswax) was, tellingly, favoured by SXSW and finding hipster success for it’s makers without creating a household name. The hushed conversations, low budget shoots and talky subjects with little or no narrative clearly left a mark on Dunham. On the evidence of this, her second feature, there seems enough to suggest Dunham can outlast anything as clichéd as a fad. The collaboration with cinematographer Jody Lee Lipes brings a more stable but no more restrictive feel than the movements other works while the sharpness of the script carries far less empty spaces or room for improvisation.
The best line is saved for Simmons, directed towards Charlotte Denham cuts straight to the core of the whole woe is me behaviour favoured in some films “Do you have the same right of entitlement as my daughter?” As well as the more commercial appeal a well realised dialogue brings, it’s made clear Denham understands it may be hard to sympathise with these characters in their comfortable lifestyle of deposable incomes and art show openings and it’s to her credit that we are not asked to. Aura’s constant strive for somebody to acknowledge her existential crisis is more than a mere post-grad funk is purposely frustrating for those around her while the internet success and video art of her and her friends is knowingly tongue-in-cheek pretentious nonsense and the cool catchphrases are pointed out and mocked.
The dialogue sometimes aches under the weight of lofty pop-culture and academic references, mainly form teenage sister Nadine – her character one of those film creations who delivers swift one-liners with the deadpan assurance of an old Kaurismaki pro. Thankfully this is only apparent as the minor blip among an otherwise convincing tale of quarter-life crisis, effectively portrayed by a Denham who will surely soon be a far more familiar name.
Reviewer: Matthew Walsh
Release Date: 30 March 2012
Director: Lena Dunham
Writer: Lena Dunham
Cast: Lena Dunham, Grace Dunham, Laurie Simmons, Jemima Kirke, Alex Karpovsky,
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