Lena Dunham, the 24-year-old director of “Tiny Furniture,” admits a fondness for Woody Allen movies. That fact helps explain why her hot-buzz indie comedy has the same energy as Allen’s early work, in particular “Annie Hall.”
I’m not saying that Dunham is a new Allen, just that such a thing is possible. After all, she is working on an HBO pilot with Judd Apatow.
“Tiny Furniture” is a family affair. Dunham, her mother (photographer Laurie Simmons) and kid sister (poet and Brown freshman Grace Dunham) play versions of themselves, and the story takes place in and around the family’s real, white-on-white loft in TriBeCa.
(There is a father, but he opted not to appear on-screen, and Lena decided against hiring an actor to play him.)
In addition, most of the other characters are based at least in part on real people. They include the obnoxious dude (Alex Karpovsky) who moves into the Dunham loft on his first date with Lena’s recent college grad, Aura; and her best buddy, eccentric Charlotte, played by a real-life friend of the director, Jemima Kirke, who tends to steal every scene she has.
The story takes place in the first weeks after Aura returns home after graduating from college. She’s not sure what she wants to do with the rest of her life; in the meantime, she gets a job as a hostess in a neighborhood restaurant.
She falls for the hipster chef (David Call). He has a girlfriend, but that doesn’t stop him from having sex with Aura in a large drainage pipe.
“Tiny Furniture,” which Lena Dunham wrote, has an abundance of deadpan humor (a dead hamster in the family refrigerator, for example).
The actors, mostly nonprofessionals, deliver their lines with understated charm, the pacing is just right and Jody Lee Lipes’ cinematography is clear and concise.
Long takes and wide shots abound, although there are occasional close-ups.
Whether “Tiny Furniture” is a mumblecore movie is an open question. It has many of the tell-tale signs of that ill-defined genre; although improvised dialogue, a mumblecore staple, is minimal.
No matter how you categorize the film, it’s one of the year’s best.