Dunham: Tiny Furniture (2010)

In some ways, the premise of Tiny Furniture isn’t that different from Girls – Lena Dunham plays a loose version of herself, struggling to cope after her mother cuts her support following graduation. The difference, in this earlier narrative, is that Dunham, or Aura, hasn’t moved out of home yet – in fact she moves back home, leaving her Midwestern university for her mother’s loft in TriBeCa, armed with nothing more than a film studies degree. Critics of Girls have complained that it celebrates the indulgences of the wealthy, and while there’s some truth to that, Tiny Furniture encapsulates everything about Dunham’s outlook that resists it as well. In part, that’s because moving back home to a wealthy mother - played by Dunham's actual mother, Laurie Simmons - really clarifies the growing financial-generational gap, even or especially among the wealthy.  And what makes Tiny Furniture so memorable and poetic is that it suggests that this difference in prospects has become so pronounced as to produce something like a Regency drama, a vision of precarity in the midst of privilege. It might be a bit of a stretch to say that it transplants Jane Austen to 2010s New York, but there’s the same urgent desire to leave the family home and move out into the world, as well as the same anxiety about qualification – except, in this case, it’s professional qualification more than romantic qualification, which, in true mumblecore spirit, tends to be dispersed and dissolved. To that end, Dunham envisages New York as a series of cramped Regency spaces – Aura’s continually clinging to fire escape balconies, and climbing through windows, navigating a pruned, cultivated universe that seems to resist her at every turn. Even when she’s outside, the camera hugs walls and corners, while the most expansive romantic encounter takes place in an aluminium pipe, light years from the establishing shots of Girls. It feels appropriate, then, that Aura’s family wealth stems from her mother’s photographs of miniature rooms, since the film exudes the cloistered claustrophobia of domestic space made over as exhibition space - that peculiar awareness, in a loft apartment, that every object has been meticulously positioned on the floor. Every single room feels like a piece of perfectly completed installation art, as Aura continually tries – and fails – to install herself somewhere, anywhere, in a perfect vehicle for Dunham’s slumped, downbeat brand of physical comedy.