The Case for Movies in Miniature

I wasn’t able to see many of the International Film Festival films this year due to a scheduling conflict.  But I was able to make it to one.  And a quirky little film it was too.

Tiny Furniture, held in the confines of the cell phone cancelling cinema in Te Papa (actually, that’s a pretty good idea, but perhaps there are health and safety and potential terrorist attack reasons that cell phone dampeners are not employed in all cinema salons?), started off as a very cute little film that seemed almost like a college effort, judging by the occasionally groan worthy acting on display.  Then I realised that the major groans were reserved for the stilted delivery of Aura’s mother (ouch, very painful; perhaps she is the director or something?) and the less polished performance of the teenage daughter.  The performances of the main, post college cast (held together by the dry confidence of the aforementioned and pretty awesome Aura) were actually all pretty solid, even if their characters may have left a bit to be desired.

“Quirk” can go several ways.  It can either be an oddball character kind of thing, where almost everyone has some strange traits that make them goofy/lovable/annoying in a laugh-at-them kind of way, or it can be all about really strange happenings occurring to some otherwise relatively normal people.  While I would tend to put Scott Pilgrim Versus the World in the latter, Tiny Furniture definitely falls into the former.  Aura and her family are the (baseline) normal characters in their New York of aspiring young people currently adrift, waiting for something to kick them along.  Nothing does, but it is that type of film.

All the characters are annoying, to one degree or another.  The guys are either moochers or users, and the females are… well, almost everything else.  Aura is definitely the most sympathetic character, which her apparent lack of modesty (refreshing, considering her not quite Hollywood physique), but her friend Charlotte, though appalling in many ways, plays the Patsy to Aura’s Eddie and so ends up stealing almost every scene that she is in.

It would be nice to say that this film is more “real” than Hollywood fare, and from a certain point of view, being an Independent film and all, it kind of is.  But the lives, while perhaps mundane, are far from ordinary (well, they are pretty fantastical to my own experience, but that might not be that hard) and the film definitely seemed to strike a chord more with the University students in the audience than almost anyone else.  One young lady next to me was snorting so much at certain points in the movie that I was a bit worried she was going to end up on convulsions on the floor, while a man behind me found certain scenes so amusing his belly laugh meant that his head ended up merely a few centimetres from my head.  My movie companions, meanwhile, were on the other end of the spectrum of reaction, running from less impressed than me to not impressed at all – and I was the eldest.

Verdict: Tiny Furniture was a fun, slight film to go and see.  Never taking itself too seriously but never really going anywhere, it seemed happy to wander around, with characters popping in and out, and a strange bookend about the early life of Aura’s mother that probably was meant as something quite profound but which passed me by in my puzzled, aged state.  6 small chairs out of 10.