Let’s hear for the girl! Young up and comer Lena Dunham has had a big year. In 2010, TINY FURNITURE, written and directed by Dunham, captured the top award at the South By Southwest Film Festival and Lena is now working on an HBO television series with Judd Apatow. Now that I’ve finally seen the movie, I can report that the accolades bestowed up on the 24 year-old filmmaker are completely warranted. TINY FURNITURE is a charmer and one of the best indies of the year.
TINY FURNITURE centers on a recent college graduate named Aura (Lena Dunham). She returns home to NYC where she grew up. Her mother, Siri (Laurie Simmons), is a photographer specializing in shooting miniatures (hence the literal basis for the film’s title). Siri’s studio is located in the family’s NYC apartment also inhabited by her teenaged sister, Nadine (Grace Dunham). Aura may have a college degree but she has no idea what to do with it. So, she takes a job as a hostess at a restaurant.
TINY FURNITURE is the kind of narrative that Woody Allen used to make important. Meandering and funny, the movie has a slacker energy that is both charming and frustrating (in a good way). Aura’s direction is nowhere in slow motion. And even though she thinks that her angst will be unending, it will pass and she will look back and laugh at how serious she once took herself. FURNITURE is a study of youth in transition, on the cusp of the next phase.
The film’s production backstory is rich. Actress Grace Dunham is filmmaker Lena Dunham’s sister in real life. And Laurie Simmons (a photographer and filmmaker herself) is the siblings actual mother. Their father apparently had no interest in the project and is not a part of the narrative. This family connection behind the scenes manifests itself seamlessly in front of the camera. The characters feel as real and as comfortable with one another as they are presumably in real life. And this couldn’t have been easy to pull off. Lena and company must have been watching closely to be careful not to simply call each other by their real names or to permit inappropriate real life personality traits from creeping subtly into the story.
Ultimately, the entire film works incredibly well. TINY FURNITURE is a must see for fans of 20-something angst ridden cinema. And you know who you are because you probably recognized one of the actors in the cast named Alex Karpovsky. An actor well known for his work with indie filmmaker Andrew Bujalski, Karpovsky is right at home in FURNITURE playing a YouTube comedy star.
Shot on the Canon DSLR 7D (the big brother of the camera we use to shoot The Film Fix), I was impressed by the look of the movie. The print or transfer I saw was in an odd aspect ratio or format of what appeared to be 16×7 (a bit narrower than the typical widescreen aspect). I liked this letter boxing. The colors were certainly good for the mood of the film and consistent with anything I’ve seen from bigger and much more expensive cameras. It certainly is a testament to the DSLR revolution. The 7D is probably perfect for independent or lower budget filmmaking.
After enjoying Lena Dunham’s TINY FURNITURE, I look forward to her next great adventure with comedy A-Lister Apatow and creative juggernaut HBO. But hopefully with more resources Dunham won’t forget the independent spirit that makes TINY FURNITURE so special.
