Tiny Furniture

"Oh, you look so pretty!"

"Oh, are you serious? I feel like this outfit just screams, like, 'I've been living in Ohio for four years - take me back to your gross apartment and have sex with me.'"

Lena Durnham captures the conflicted emotions of returning to home after college, to enter the confusing world of adulthood in Tiny Furniture.

Lena Durnham has mined her own reality (her own mother and sister play themselves in the film) to share her insecurities and unstable sense of self in a a painfully honest and very, very funny film. Durnham’s readiness to turn the camera on her self and her own bodily imperfections (which are constantly highlighted by the perfection of her mother’s Tribeca loft, and best friend’s Lolitaesque beauty) was both refreshingly brave, and painfully hard to watch. I am Dora was particularly struck by her very physical inability to fit in to her new life or contemplate her new future. Her palpable fear at the idea of ‘womanhood’, is skilfully explored in the consistently humiliating choices she makes when selecting her clothes, her jobs and her men, and her constant return to her mother embrace.

Watch the trailer for Tiny Furniture, playing on an extended run this week.

Jemma Desai is guest blogger on our film programme this week, her publication, I am Dora, which launches with a screening on 31 May, explores female identity in film, and psychoanalysis.  

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