REVIEW: Lena Dunham's Tiny Furniture a Surprising, Startling Pleasure

Readings from Siri's early diaries are a part of the film's survey of the booby traps, feminist and otherwise, studding the path toward a functional self. Part Susan Sontag ("I think of myself as this weird mutation from the '50s. Doris Day in Soho"), part Susan Powter ("I want to weigh between 125 and 128 pounds, and be happy"), these diary entries suggest that Siri's early inner life consisted mainly of careerist plotting and obsessing over food. "Our moms are assholes," Charlotte shrugs, "[They're] too successful not to be." Aura's kind of an asshole too -- a shitty friend, a selfish daughter and a slave to male attention -- but she's also funny, sensitive, and driven.

What's fascinating about the way she wields her body -- which is frequently, frankly pantsless -- is the way it seems to confront and mortify others. In one of the best scenes (a direct mirroring of the climax of Greenberg, a film generally reflected here in more glancing terms) Aura pulls rank over her teenaged sister, who is throwing a deafening rager while their mom is out, by parading through the party in her underpants. She gets the reaction she wants: rage and submission.

Which is not to say that Aura is immune to humiliation; indeed, she seems drawn to the most reliable sources she can find. There are two men in her life: Jed (Alex Karpovsky), a loathsome aspiring comic, and Keith (David Call), the handsome, deadbeat sous-chef at the restaurant where she works as a hostess. The moves she puts on both men -- Jed after she installs him in her home to freeload with perfect diffidence, Keith when he sniffs around for a Vicodin connection -- seem like an experiment with no hypothesis, an extension of the impulse to define herself against something or someone else.

After Aura punishes herself sufficiently with a gruesome episode of public sex, a certainty hardens within her. At home her mother is snitting about being left alone -- the funhouse lens on Dunham's home life has been torqued to eliminate her father, another artist, completely -- and Aura climbs into bed beside her to right the scales. "I want to be as successful as you are," she says suddenly, and in the doubled close-up it is movingly evident what this admission cost her.

Dunham is a deceptively responsive actress: more agile for her stillness; more naked for all the ways she tries to cover up. The complementary tone of droll but freighted psychodrama she strikes in Tiny Furniture feels like a significant but precarious achievement. I feel a pinch of worry for her -- as I did for Aura -- looking into a future of Rudins and Apatows. "It's hard to completely close the door on modes of western femininity," says Aura's college pal, already in mourning for the insular years of uninterrupted thought and unbounded expression, and resigned to the real world and its displacing, mercenary ways. "But my grant is up and my housing ends next week." This film is a foot in that door; with luck it will be looked back upon as the promise, and not the pinnacle, of an uncompromising career.

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