Nobody Walks

I admire Tiny Furniture and some of Girls, but the art-brat characterizations and New York hipster conflicts of the Lena Dunham world arguably overstay their welcome in episodic form. But in cinema her voice is most effective. As written by Dunham, this quiet and seemingly trite and trendy indie picture surprisingly turns into a deft examination of the powerful force of female sexuality and the fallibility of the male libido.

Nobody Walks (2012) dir. Ry Russo-Young
Starring: Olivia Thirlby, John Krasinski, Rosemary DeWitt, Justin Kirk

By Alan Bacchus

Martine (Thirlby) is an attractive gal, a film director working on her own massively pretentious B&W art film about insects. Her work is less important than her demeanor. Early on when she arrives in L.A. we see her flirting with her seat partner and then vigorously making out with the stranger in the parking lot. She denies his desires for a quickie and goes on her way.

This scene, and the whole film for that matter, is shot with an observational, realist style which admirably misdirects to the very strong thematic statement, the idea of the four women in this film representing four stages of a woman’s sexual awareness, and the exploration of the powerful psychological effects on libidinous ID-powered men.

Martine arrives at the guest house of Peter (Krasinski) and Julie (DeWitt) and their two kids to live and sound edit her film with Peter. Martine’s unconcious sexuality is an immediate attraction to Peter, which doesn’t go unnoticed by Julie. Though while acting as a therapist for an egotistical film director, (Kirk) Julie herself is on the receiving end of sexual advances from her client. It's the same with Julie’s 16-year-old daughter Caroline, who is taking Italian lessons from a brazenly forthright Italian tutor.

The plot turns when Peter gives into Julie’s coy advances and has sex in the house. For Martine it’s just some casual sex, quickly forgotten. But for Peter it’s more, which causes his rational mind to unravel. Meanwhile, the events of Julie and Caroline run parallel to Peter and Julie’s issues, as the feminist themes admirable connect all these characters.

Director Russo-Young establishes a quiet and anti-dramatic tone early using familiar indie aesthetic tools. The film features grainy but rich and textured super 16mm format, grab-it-and-go b-roll footage of Los Angeles, and a melancholy ambient soundtrack by Fall On Your Sword (Lola Versus, Another Earth). While many of these American-indie relationship dramas, including Dunham’s own Tiny Furniture trend towards the esoteric and introspective to the conflicts of the characters, Russo-Young and Dunham leave us with a surprisingly bold feminist statement and a film which resonates as deep as any of the post-Mumblecore pictures.

***½

Tiny Furniture

Tiny Furniture (2011) dir. Lena Dunham
Starring: Lena Dunham, Laurie Simmons, Grace Dunham, Jemima Kirk, Alex Karpovsky, David Call

***½

By Alan Bacchus

Tiny Furniture is a remarkable little quirky gem from a then 24-year-old wunderkind of sorts. This is Lena Dunham, a New Yorker who, even before turning 25, established a unique voice in cinema by satirizing the New York Art Brat scene. Tiny Furniture wasn’t even her first feature film. Before that she honed her self-referential life story into a smaller film, Creative Nonfiction, and two web series, Tight Shots (2007) and Delusional Downtown Divas (2008), as well as a number of shorts.

The themes, characters and situations of her previous work merge like those of a young Quentin Tarantino into her breakthrough film, Tiny Furniture, which famously won the SXSW Narrative Feature Film Award in 2010. This led to her soon-to-premiere Judd Apatow-produced HBO series, Girls.

Lena courageously puts a thinly disguised version of herself onto the screen as Aura, a college film school grad returning home to Manhattan to live with her mother and hopefully figure out what to do with her life. The imposing figure of her immensely successful mother, who owns an impressive studio loft and makes a living creating art from photographing ‘tiny furniture’, is a passive burden on Aura. Same with her younger sister, who isn’t out of high school but has achieved more as an artist than anything Aura has done. Add to her woes being dumped by her boyfriend and the presence of her former childhood friend, Charlotte, an over-privileged brat.

For most of the picture we see Aura moping around in unglamorous bedroom attire with no makeup and her hair unconditioned in a perpetual bed head. It’s a far cry from the meticulously coifed hipsters she hangs out with. Despite her appearance, Aura is bubbly, effervescent and optimistic on the outside. She takes a job as a hostess at a local restaurant and is sort of dating a couch-surfing fellow art brat, Jed. In fact, most of the film is conflict-free, as we follow Aura around in her post-grad malaise, which doesn’t really seem to concern her.

The shoe drops when her mother’s confrontation about Jed sparks the anger-fueled shouting match of frustration we’ve been expecting to see. In order to reconcile her angst, Aura engages in a mild sexual bender with a restaurant colleague and eventually confesses her insecurities to her mother.

Ms. Dunham would probably be the first to admit the problems of her character are tepid at best, certainly not melodramatic – an understated emotional journey. But it’s Dunham’s remarkably addictive character and performance that has us glued to the screen. There seems to be a conscious effort for Dunham to expose the most unglamorous parts of her body, often walking around the house in a long t-shirt with no pants, glorifying her pear-shaped body. Dunham’s comfort with her own body is not lost on us, as it conforms to the honesty she puts into her character. The hipster art world environment also threatens to make us all feel inferior, and yet Aura is someone we’d actually want to be friends with. She’s an unpretentious, down-to-earth woman with the same struggles of insecurity as the rest of us.

There’s also Dunham's superb eye for composition and unique mise-en-scene. She maximizes the small spaces of her mother’s loft as well as the real Manhattan cafes, bars and streets in and on which she films. As such, Tiny Furniture is stylized but real and honest – qualities that are rare for such a young filmmaker.

Tiny Furniture is available on Blu-ray from The Criterion Collection.