She's having a hard time

By More Intelligent Life | NEW YORK

LENA DUNHAM is the new indie “it” girl. She's been profiled in the New Yorker, stamped with Judd Apatow's seal of approval, and has an HBO series is in the works.“Tiny Furniture”, a film that she wrote, directed and stars in, is hot on the festival circuit.

In the film Dunham plays Aura, a version of herself with all the confident bits scrubbed away.Aura returns from "a college in Ohio" (ie, Oberlin) completely directionless. Her feminist boyfriend has just broken up with her and she is armed with only her hamster, a YouTube video of herself bathing in the school fountain, and a degree in film theory. Upon returning to her childhood home in Manhattan, she finds that her successful, artist mother and her overachieving, statuesque sister don't quite need her anymore. She is unlucky in love, reconnects with Charlotte, a wild childhood friend, and flounders, a lot.

Siri, the mother in the film is played by her real mother, the artist and photographer Laurie Simmons (profiled here alongside her husband, Carroll Dunham, a painter). The film takes its name from the small props Siri uses in her work. Dunham's actual sister performs the role of her sister in the film, which is set in their actual home in Tribeca. That these characters play a version of themselves heightens the emotional quotient: we feel for Aura, but we also feel for Lena underneath.

Aura is also ‘real' in a way that Hollywood starlets often aren't: she looks normal. The film is filled with close-ups without make up, unflattering changing shots, and many scenes without pants.Rarely does the filmmaker miss a chance to let the camera consider her not-quite-nubile body. As with the fountain-bathing video (which Dunham herself created and posted to YouTube in college), Dunham uses the body to create humour and pathos.

The film could be classified as satirical mumblecore reality-television. The dialogue is hysterical, oscillating between the scripted and the loosely improvised. Many of the best lines are uttered by Aura's new-old friend Charlotte, played by Jemima Kirke, who puts such things as “having a landline” on her resume. Charlotte adds a vivacious counterpoint to Aura's ennui, yet her dress, movement and delivery give the viewer a peek at the sadness underneath.

Among the praise there has been some valuable criticism, notably from Dave Edelstein at New York magazine, that the film only appeals to a small, useless slice of society—navel-gazing liberal-arts graduates who live in their parent's mod loftsand don't work.The lead, as well as the story, is a bit whiny and self-indulgent—it is the type of film where you wonder at the mid-way point how they're going to tie things up.

But the hype surrounding “Tiny Furniture” is deserved. Dunham captures the pains of a creative person with some big shoes to fill, who has come of age in a generation bred on relentless exhibitionism. Most successfully, the film and the naturalistic way it was made allow for the ambiguities of real life to come through.

"Tiny Furniture" playing now in selected cinemas in America