Film
Tiny Furniture
Tiny Furniture may be the most adorable movie ever made about people who can’t be bothered to recognize your existence.
Published: February 9, 2011
Writer/director/star Lena Dunham’s Tiny Furniture may be the most adorable movie ever made about people who can’t be bothered to recognize your existence. It’s a fairly typical liberal-arts-graduate-returning-home-after-college-to-figure-things-out movie, only home is a gorgeous, two-story Tribeca flat where mom and sister (Dunham’s real-life mother, artist Laurie Simmons, and sister Grace Dunham; her father is the sublime painter Carroll Dunham) live the privileged life of, well, people who live in a gorgeous, two-story Tribeca flat. Dunham’s Aura is merely sorting things out and feels like a visitor in the apartment—and city—where she grew up. Kudos to Dunham for capturing this life with an insider’s beguiling eye; many shots work as comedic puns and create visual divides between Aura and others. If Tiny Furniture feels a little coy, it is a post-collegiate finding-myself flick. Co-star Jemima Kirke steals every scene she’s in here, not only because she delivers “Let’s go to Odeon and order everything on the menu” like she’s actually done it before, but because her Charlotte embodies the sort of indolent downtown decadence that has been drawing young people from the contiguous 48 to the Manhattan below 14th Street for generations.
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