Tiny Furniture (2010)

TINY FURNITURE  (2010)  ¢
    D: Lena Dunham
    Lena Dunham, Merritt Wever, Grace Dunham,
    Laurie Simmons, Alex Karpovsky, Jemima Kirke
I've never been quite sure what constitutes a mumblecore movie, but I think this might be one. It's got a low budget and an amateur cast and a boring lead character (a young woman named Aura, just home from film school) trying to work out her boring personal issues by inflicting them on all her boring acquaintances and friends. And if Aura can't find happiness (and she can't), she'll do the next best thing: share her misery with everybody else. It's a case where you wonder whether the filmmaker herself is any different from the character she's playing. You hope not, but there's so little artistry in this, it's hard to say. Aura is somebody with absolutely no concept of personal space. She doesn't want any for herself, and it doesn't seem to matter to her that other people might. The result is a kind of suffocating intimacy that men sometimes take advantage of, and everybody - friends, relatives, lovers - steps away from sooner or later. Apparently, Aura's endless existential suffering isn't nearly as fascinating to anybody else as it is to her. And Dunham has made this really boring, irritating movie about it. The movie lasts 98 minutes, but it feels a lot longer, like a relationship that you wonder why you got into that goes bad real fast, and now you're just putting up with it till you can figure out a way to get the hell out. 98 minutes spent watching a movie like "Tiny Furniture" is way more than enough.