a very fine line between charmingly quirky and irritating. Lena Dunham’s film walks along that tightrope, occasionally threatening to slip but just about reaching the other side intact.
Her film, which wrote, directed and stars in, comes very much under the mumblecore’ genre. She plays Aura, a fragile student who has graduated from the University Of Nowhere and returned to New York to her mum’s apartment. Mum Siri is a living nightmare uptight, repressed and very angry about something. Mum is also in league with Aura’s sister Nadine, and together they make her feel as welcome as a minor foot infection.
Aura meets up with an old friend, Candice, who gets her a job as a hostess in a lowlife bar. There she meets a handsome but flaky chef, who competes for her affections with another boy, Jed, who is crashing in her mum’s flat.
Anyone who has seen Miranda July’s You And Me And Everything We Know will know what to expect here. Aura is overweight, with bad skin, needy, irksome and bullied, yet somehow Dunham manages to instil her with some sympathy and pathos. Her two suitors, one a film nerd and one a book nerd with a pill addiction, are equally unsuitable and have the effect of rooting for her to get rid of both of them.
It’s the sort of film where the characters congratulate each other on their similes: “Pills are like lying on a bearskin rug in front of a fire “Nice. The soundtrack is indie, the clothes are ill-fitting, and there are references to several other films that are far more honest than this one, even Picnic At Hanging Rock.
Yet having said all of that, it’s strangely, weirdly watchable and even compelling. I suspect Dunham, having got this clearly autobiographical story out of her system, will go on to better things. The title by the way refers to the toy furniture her mum takes in her job as a professional photographer.
Overall verdict: Classic mumblecore indie fare which will irritate many and charm a few, with a sympathetic central performance.
Reviewer: Mike Martin