Tiny Furniture (***1/4)

Lena Dunham’s off-kilter comedy might seem a little less fresh if the main character were a guy who’d just returned from college instead of a girl. You don’t see as many films about slacker women on the dating scene as about men. But Dunham’s odd sensibility probably would separate the movie from its testosterone-fueled ilk—I’m thinking of Forgetting Sarah Marshall, Knocked Up, and so on—no matter who her main character was. As it happens, Dunham, all of 24, not only wrote and directed but also stars as Aura, who’s returned from Ohio to live, again, with her mother, a Manhattanite who makes a living from photographing, yes, tiny furniture, among other artistic pursuits.

Aura’s had a college experience that’s neither good nor bad and has relationships with her mother and younger sister that are neither good nor bad, but a little of both. (Dunham’s real mother plays her mother.) There are two potential love interests. One is a broke You Tube “celebrity” who makes videos of himself spouting nonsense on a toy horse. The other is a chef hoping to score some pills off Aura’s childhood friend, with whom she has become reacquainted. So it’s not a romantic comedy, but a comedic drama about a more or less ordinary girl who has no idea what to do next.

It’s a little too quirky for the mainstream. The pacing is very good, but the characters are not typically cinematic, with a very flat affect, the exception being the childhood friend, whose early sojourn in London has resulted in her speaking in a British accent and calling herself “Tribeca’s solution to Marianne Faithfull,” a reference perhaps obscure to those too young to know of the 1960s Mick Jagger girlfriend-turned-addict-turned torch singer/actress. It occupies some middle ground between documentary (or reality-show) realism—notable is Dunham’s being both pudgy and willing to be filmed with a complexion that’s obviously flawed in some scenes—and self-conscious oddity, and between comedy and oddity. Typical is the scene in which Aura’s mother tells her it’s okay to sleep in her bed when she’s home, but not when she’s away, or when her sister laments Aura’s reoccupying the bedroom that’s now become the sister’s “special space.” Kind of funny, kind of strange. In my view, the naturalism allows it to escape pretentiousness, but I can see how others would disagree.

IMDB link

viewed 12/29?/10 at Ritz Bourse and reviewed 1/4/11