Fabrizio del Wrongo writes:

Lena Dunham has deflected attempts to categorize her work as mumblecore. Watching her “Tiny Furniture” I understood why: the picture is tightly scripted and controlled, a caterpillar-like series of awkward-comic vignettes that never lapses into navel gazing or gets encumbered by dust bunnies. That’s probably why I enjoyed it more than I have the work of mumblier directors, which often seems so intent on being authentic (whatever that means) that it just about disappears while you’re watching it. (These films tend to play like “My Night at Maud’s” with lousy dialog, if you can imagine such a thing.) Dunham, by contrast, has fashioned her screenplay to play to her strengths, namely her dry, self-deflating wit and her oddball comic timing. This latter gift may not be the same as having a great “movie sense,” but in a film comprised of comic encounters it serves pretty well  — the episodes swell, crest, and flatten out like jokes in slow motion, and they’re over before you have a chance to grow bored of them.

It’s either out of considerable self-confidence or considerable self-disgust that Dunham plops herself right into the center of her movie; she plays Aura, a not-at-all-disguised riff on her real-life self. The character is pudgy, vacillating, and possibly untalented. Her student project (she’s a film studies graduate) is a video showing her walking around campus in a bikini, her overexposed flesh perhaps intended as a rebuke of patriarchy or something equally dippy. Within the context of the film, it’s funny, because it italicizes our worst assumptions about Aura. But it also serves as a half-parodic image of what “Tiny Furniture” might have been under the influence of a mushier sensibility — a pity parade, perhaps, or a look-at-me stunt.

Dunham the real-life filmmaker is too tough-minded for that. In fact, “Tiny Furniture” fairly bristles with sharp observations and disagreeable truths. I think this is partly why her HBO series “Girls” has been so picked over by the blogosphere: bloggers seem to recognize in her a fellow observer and commentator, and they’re fascinated by her willingness to bump up against PC shibboleths. When Aura engages in hasty, spit-lubed sex with a shitheel co-worker, the moment is presented without punctuation; Dunham allows the meaninglessness of it to hang in the air, forcing us to try to assimilate it in the same way that Aura does. This interest in condensing, relaying, and repeatedly turning over experience is once again reminiscent of blogging, and it may be that for members of team mumblecorps digital filmmaking is like a new, more public form of diary keeping — a platform for concretizing experience in a way that’s both highly personal and uncomfortably exposed. (Dunham seems to acknowledge this when she repeatedly shows Aura peeking at her mother’s ’70s-era diary.) The other major touchstone, it seems to me, is the indy comics scene of Daniel Clowes and other authors, which mumblecore resembles both in its retiring, tamped-down aesthetic and its focus on confessional self-deprecation.

Possibly, Dunham’s self-deprecating streak is what gives her her oomph as a comic filmmaker. It’s reminiscent of Albert Brooks, Woody Allen, and Jerry Seinfeld, and it’s hard not to see these similarities as deriving from what I guess is okay to call Jewish-style humor (Dunham is half Jewish). Although the latter two men are referenced explicitly in “Tiny Furniture,” it’s Brooks I kept returning to while watching the movie, perhaps because its visual style has a discomforting precision reminiscent of Brooks-directed films like “Lost in America” and “Modern Romance.” (The cinematography in “Tiny Furniture,” which is only occasionally too precious, is by Jody Lee Lipes.) Like Brooks, Dunham favors situations that are pitched between satire and anxious masochism, and while I’m not sure she shares his cruel streak, she definitely has his knack for underplaying — some of the biggest laughs in “Tiny Furniture” are served up cold.

For a movie cast almost entirely with non-professionals (Dunham’s mom and sisters play versions of themselves), “Tiny Furniture” is pretty well acted. I particularly enjoyed Jemima Kirke as Charlotte, a childhood acquaintance of Aura’s who abruptly blips into her inner circle, seemingly out of convenience or boredom. Charlotte is a partygirl WASP with a phony-baloney accent, and Kirke effortlessly nails the sort of blithe entitlement that Whit Stillman needs paragraphs of dialog to work up; she seems to be having a lot of fun with the part. I also got a kick out of Laurie Simmons and Grace Dunham as, respectively, Aura’s mother and sister. Their lack of resemblance to Aura — they’re both tall and rather willowy — provides for a good visual joke, one which Dunham uses to bolster the them-against-me theme running throughout the movie. And when family arguments rev up, they slip into high gear with startling velocity, as though the actors had scraped into something real knocking just below the surface. The whole family seems pretty fearless.

“Tiny Furniture” is currently available to stream on Netflix Instant.

Here’s the trailer: