Tiny Furniture is a Comedic Gem

d. Lena Dunham/USA/2010/98 minutes

“Ms. Dunham is a keen writer, creating angular, quietly weaponized dialogue that her characters use to maim one another…it brings to mind Larry David’s ability to take his own tics and add humor and stakes to make them matter to others.” David Carr, NY Times

“Tiny Furniture is flush with humor and visual poetry” Emmet Duff, Sound on Sight

Funny and charming, Tiny Furniture is writer/director Lena Dunham’s indie coming of age tale that has critics comparing her to Woody Allen (Click here for trailer).  After four years of college, Aura returns to her artist mother's ridiculously hip all-white TriBeCa loft with the following: a useless film theory degree, 357 hits on her YouTube page, a boyfriend who's left her to find himself at Burning Man, a dying hamster and her tail between her legs. Luckily, her train wreck childhood best friend never left home, the restaurant down the block is hiring and ill-advised romantic possibilities lurk.

Aura quickly throws away her liberal-arts clogs and careens into her old/new life: a dead-end “day hostess” job at a restaurant that isn’t actually open during the day, parties on chilly East Village fire escapes, stealing twenties out of her mother's Prada purse, prison-style tattoos done out of sheer boredom, drinking all the wine in her mother's neatly organized cabinets, competing with her over-achieving teenage sister and awkward sex episodes.

Aura's problem is that her life is really so comfortable people miss the fact she feels genuinely lost and depressed. She latches on to two men so openly disastrous that her interactions with them have a sort of comedic suspense – which one will mistreat her first?

Dunham stars as Aura, with her actual mother and sister, Laurie Simmons and Grace Dunham, playing those roles – plus she shot the film in the family’s loft. Dunham is a gifted comedienne. In her unvarnished performance, Aura's vulnerability and the often bitingly funny series of humiliations that arise from it make her sympathetic but, at the same time, don’t forgive the sometimes awful things she does. Surrounded on all sides by what she could become, Aura just wants someone to tell her who she is and what she’s worth.

Film screens at the BUEI Tradewinds Auditorium on Thursday, 19 August at 6.30pm. Tickets are available at the door from 5.30pm. Film club members $8; regular tickets $10. Film running time is 98 minutes. For reservations and all inquiries email info@biff.bm or call 293 3456.

Film appropriate for 18+