19. Tiny Furniture, directed by
Lena Dunham

Tiny Furniture in Huge Houses

 

Before there was Girls, there was Tiny Furniture, the micro-budget feature film that launched Lena Dunham’s career. Think Hannah, think Jessa, and think extreme relevance in the form of ‘what-the-hell-am-I-doing-with-my-life’ themes.

Very similar to Girls in terms of its basis and initial scenario, Tiny Furniture focuses on college graduate Aura (Lena Dunham) who returns home lost, confused and wondering what she is doing with her life. What during university may have been just a distant worry of her uncertain future now becomes the pressing concern of her uncertain present. Without direction or motivation her arts degree is a useless one, and her self-worth is only downgraded in the presence of her successful mother and talented sister, Nadine. The parallel between Nadine and herself is humorously drawn up, at times literally, with a shot divided by the wall separating their rooms, in which Nadine uses the treadmill on one side and Aura sprawls sloth-like on the other.

Fresh from a breakup with her college boyfriend, done and dusted with university, distanced from her college friends and back to the family home where she started, Aura is metaphorically and physically adrift in the world. No longer defined by the labels, objects and people she surrounded herself with, Aura struggles to find her sense of purpose and self. At once she hates living at home and loves it, relishing the comfort it brings her while despising the petty irritants of domestic living arrangements. She vacillates between wanting independence and craving the sheltering security home-life offers. So perfectly does Dunham capture the entitlement and selfishness of our younger generations, the tendency to be self-absorbed and self-pitying.

In the film, her mother Siri is an artist who takes pictures of tiny furniture in her loft, palatial by New York standards. Both Siri and Nadine are Dunham’s real life mother and sister, becoming fictionalised versions of themselves. Who says you have to study acting to be an actor? All of them are brilliant and add to the hyper-real quality of the film. In Tiny Furniture, Aura has no present father figure, partly because Dunham wished to develop a strong female-centric story, and partly because her father didn’t wish to appear. It seems he does not share in his daughter’s lean towards the over-share.

Re-establishing her life in New York, Aura reconnects with a childhood friend, Charlotte played by Jemima Kirk (Jessa in Girls) and starts working part-time at a crappy, low-pay job at a restaurant. She also clings onto friend-of-a-friend Jed (Ray from Girls), a YouTuber whose head is probably bigger than his followers. Kirke plays a similar role to her TV character, that of the charismatic, exciting bad influence. Her new friends’ veneer of confident togetherness draws Aura in, and her desperation to win people over is a flaw, particularly when it comes to loser guys. Here, the scales of taking and giving seem heavily tipped, with Aura obliviously going along.

Early on, Aura finds her mother’s old adolescent diary and guiltlessly starts reading it. There are entries full of big thoughts and self-reflective musings that end with foods she ate that day. Succinct in undercutting the faults in social cornerstones, this is exactly why Dunham’s writing is so brilliant. The line, “Today I ate zucchini bread, cheese crackers and wine” directly after existential meditation is a terse stab at the social conditioning that undermines females in a way that males will never understand. Furthermore, it highlights the problematic relationship that many of us have with food, whereby self-worth is directly connected with what we’ve eaten that day.

At times, Tiny Furniture is heavy with in-your-face close ups, particularly when characters are conversing outside in streets or parties, lending an intimacy to the experience. Dunham shows them as real and imperfect in her grander depiction of honest life. This is something shared with her later hit show, aesthetically realised through the same grittiness, purged of smoothness but packed instead with the dirtiness of life. This extends to the portrayal of Aura, as a highly flawed protagonist who at times is quite literally dirty, without makeup or washed hair. Shared too with Hannah from Girls is Aura’s penchant for no-pants. Contrasting to the close-ups are the wide shots revealing an overwhelming isolation either separately or between characters, notably the repeated shot of Aura standing before her mother’s gleaming white wall of identical cabinets.

It could be expected that this film, somewhat of a precursor to Girls, would be underdeveloped, especially when it was written by Dunham in a number of days and filmed the following month. But to presume this would be to underestimate Dunham’s extraordinary mental and creative capabilities. Always with a strong vision, Dunham is not afraid to boldly tell it on screen, regardless of whether it is a flattering one. I enjoyed this feature immensely, and it’s hugely relatable for anyone who has finished college and been flung out into the real world and back into their family home.