Hats off, gentlemen! A filmmaker!

Keith (David Call) and Aura (Lena Dunham) in Dunham's "Tiny Furniture"
It was with some trepidation that I went to see Lena Dunham's Tiny Furniture.  From what little I'd read about it on movie blogs, it seemed of a piece with the "mumblecore" movement -- low budget, hipster-styled films about 20-something characters in relationship issues and generally lacking the ability to speak with a whole lot of articulation or passion about much of anything.  My exposure to mumblecore is limited -- I've seen The Exploding Girl (starring Zoe Kazan) and about half of Hannah Takes the Stairs, with Greta Gerwig, who has graduated from Mumblecore Princess to Mainstream Actress thanks to her turn opposite Ben Stiller in Noah Baumbach's Greenberg.  These are films that rely heavily on the charismatic presence of their lead actors and which don't seem, shall we say, to have been written to within an inch of their life.  They have certain atmospheric qualities that intrigue me, but I haven't yet resolved the question as to whether there's much "there" there.  Perhaps the idea is that by desaturating certain conventional cinema tropes -- of dialogue, of dramatic structure, of camerawork -- these films allow us to bring more to them as viewers, a more idiosyncratic, personal, and original response.  Or maybe they just don't have much money to shoot with and didn't spend a lot of time working on the screenplay.  I'm still trying to hash all that out.

Meanwhile, along comes Tiny Furniture, which really doesn't belong in any sort of grouping with mumblecore.  Though it was shot for the shoestring of a shoestring, Dunham's feature is remarkably assured, not only in its writing and acting, but on a pictorial level as well.  The very aspect ratio in which it was shot -- a full 2.35:1 frame -- seems like a defiant statement to the effect that "I'm making cinema, dammit!"  The story involves the adventures of a recent college grad in the months after she has completed her education.  Aura, the heroine, comes home to New York City and moves in with her successful-but-aloof artist mother and her perpetually preoccupied and rather pissy teenage sister.  Lacking a clear direction of what to do next in her life, Aura attends parties, tries to date boys, gets a lousy job, and expresses boatloads of post-collegiate angst.  All of this may sound insufferable when described in this way, but as is always the case, the sink-or-swim comes in the details.  Dramatizing a theme that has been used plenty of times before -- from Mike Nichols' The Graduate to Baumbach's Kicking and Screaming -- Dunham brings a deft personal touch to the material.  Yes, postcollegiate angst has been done a million times before, but this is her postcollegiate angst, and she keeps it dutifully specific.

The script doesn't follow a top-heavy plot, and there's a sort of structural vagueness at work so that you don't quite know when the end is coming.  But plenty of things happen in the story.  Aura's plight is twofold: on the job front, she doesn't know how to hoist herself to a position of earning a decent wage, and she's not sure what her career goals are or how to attain them.  Romantically, she is recovering from a break-up of which she speaks with more casualness than we believe, and her self-esteem is at a low ebb.  The bulk of the film focuses on Aura's halting efforts to spark relationships with two men who have wandered into her life.  The first is a minor Youtube celebrity (performed with languid charisma by Alex Karpovsky) who turns out to be more of a moocher than anything else, staying at her house for day after day without showing any inclination to move on, and withholding sex less out of principle or distaste than out of sheer blase lassitude.  The second (played by David Call) is a sous-chef working at a restaurant where Aura works as a hostess.  Possessing a handsome visage and a feral, bad-tempered intensity, he seems initially to be more promising than the Karpovsky character, but soon is revealed to have shortcomings of his own.  Aura takes in all these life events, most of them minor, with a deadpan calm, as though she's in a holding pattern and processing everything before making the next serious decision about her life.  Unlike most movies, Tiny Furniture isn't about big life decisions -- it's more about the stuff that happens in between them.

What's most impressive about Dunham's screenplay is the verbal discipline with which she executes these familiar scenarios.  She doesn't write a lot of rambling, self-indulgent dialogue.  She writes jokes -- funny ones, with real punchlines.  She writes scenes with a beginning, a middle, and an end.  She incorporates sight gags (including a hilarious one involving vast rows of white cabinets in her mother's home).  She builds individual sequences to effective climaxes, although she is less successful at placing an overarching teleology onto the film as a whole.  She can direct actors -- or non-actors.  Speaking to the audience at the Nuart Theatre in West L.A. after a screening of Tiny Furniture, Dunham spoke about her process with the actors, some of whom are actual family members.  She rehearses little, discusses the basic dramatic thrust of the scenes with her actors and answers any outstanding questions, and then just starts shooting.  It's a process that works.  Tiny Furniture is populated with memorable personalities, ably performed -- by the end of the movie you find yourself liking them and wanting to know more about them, even the assholes.  Jemima Kirke gets a particularly juicy role as Aura's saucy British "bad-girl" best friend Charlotte, who drapes her smallest gestures in such operatic melodrama that we find ourselves liking her immediately. 

Dunham and her cinematographer, Jody Lee Lipes, bring remarkable visual flair to the proceedings.  Much use is made of the central location -- the spotless, white-walled, squeaky-clean house that functions both as Aura's shelter after college and as a sort of soul-sucking void that reduces her to a perpetual adolescence and seems to exert a drag on her ever going out into the world and planting a flag of her own.  In the rich panoply of movie houses that take on a life of their own -- from Rebecca to Psycho to Poltergeist, this abode earns a spot, albeit not in the expected genre.  The widescreen photography makes strong use of the location, dividing the frame into self-contained compartments in which people are seen (sometimes full-body, sometimes only in segments) living alongside one another but oddly apart.  Aura's home is depicted not as a place of warmth or comfort, but as a stark battleground in which territorial struggles are constantly underway -- yet this is played to comic effect, retaining a lightness and sense of fun that never leaves the film.

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