Directed by Lena Dunham. Starring Lena Dunham, Laurie Simmons, Grace Dunham, Jemima Kirke Club, IFI, Dublin, 99 min
AURA, a newly graduated and recently dumped “YouTube artist”, returns home to mope around her mother’s impossibly chic New York apartment and hang out with like-minded “famous in an internet kind of way” navel-gazers. And, erm, that’s about it really.
If you think Miranda July is a touch indie schmindie, then you best duck and take cover. Mumblecore’s latest self-absorbed auteur heroine, Lena Dunham, hits our shores with a good deal of expectation and an upcoming Judd Apatow collaboration attached.
Should we believe the hype? Certainly, the writer, director and star of Tiny Furniture gives her unfettered all as the odious, chubby narcissist at the heart of this aimless, vague drama. Time and again, she bravely bears an outsized stomach, thighs and ego. Time and again she pours herself into Spanx for our bemusement.
The girdle, indeed, becomes emblematic of everything that’s wrong with the central character, a selfish, indolent misery-guts who carps endlessly on her own dissatisfaction and yet can’t be bothered to effect a single change for the better.
Aura is unquestionably ghastly. But she’s the best of a bad, bad lot. Her mother, a TriBeCa-based photographer working exclusively with the miniatures of the title, is too mean to tolerate houseguests. Her sister is too nasty to tolerate anyone. The men are even worse. Will Aura end up with YouTube’s star “Nietzschean Cowboy” or will she plump for the promiscuous sous-chef? And will we actually care?
There are some killer lines of dialogue scattered throughout the screenplay: “On my resume under skills I put ‘has a landline’,” chirps Aura’s BF (Jemima Kirke, the best thing in the film). And the debuting writer-director makes her lo-fi, $50,000 budget stretch a long, long way with clean digital stock and one-room set-ups.
But Dunham’s satirical intentions can’t quite compensate for the pain of spending almost 100 heartless minutes in the company of irredeemably unlikeable characters. No film with so little plot or warmth should linger for so long.
