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" Film juries have been known to get borderline violent when they can&amp;#039;t agree on prize awards. But at last spring&amp;#039;s South by Southwest festival, the three-person jury I was on deliberated pretty much as follows: Juror No. 1: &amp;quot;Tiny Furniture, right?&amp;quot; Jurors 2 and 3: &amp;quot;Yep.&amp;quot; The first full-length feature by the 24-year-old filmmaker Lena Dunham, Tiny Furniture is a post-grad coming-of-age tale, a timeworn genre\u2014but none the worse for the wear in Dunham&amp;#039;s wickedly talented hands. Writing, directing, and starring in her microbudget comedy, Dunham covers a lot of territory, ranging from how a wounded but brainy plain Jane negotiates her way in the world\u2014sexually not least of all\u2014to exploring the nature of friendship and giving us a tasty slice of haute-bohemian New York City life. And while more than one eligible man puts in a vivid appearance, the relationships that matter most in this movie are intensely female.  Tiny Furniture opens with Dunham&amp;#039;s plump, bedraggled Aura arriving home from her Ohio college with a degree in film theory, a handful of YouTube videos she&amp;#039;s begun to regret, and a freshly broken heart. Home is a two-story white loft in TriBeCa\u2014one of Manhattan&amp;#039;s most exclusive neighborhoods, and one known in particular for its rich artists. Inhabited by Aura&amp;#039;s mother, Siri, and teenage sister, Nadine, the loft is huge but barely seems to have room for the returnee. As Nadine, who has just won a national prize for her poetry, snottily puts it, &amp;quot;How long are you going to be staying in our house?&amp;quot; Siri, sporting the downtown art-star uniform of black cigarette pants and matching scoop-neck top, is warmer, but she&amp;#039;s also totally absorbed in her latest project. When Aura asks her where she keeps the lightbulbs, Siri says distractedly, &amp;quot;They&amp;#039;re in the white cabinet&amp;quot;\u2014at which point the camera directs our gaze to a wall-size built-in with so many identical doors that it looks less like storage space than a game show from hell. But what&amp;#039;s really making Aura feel like an alien is that, unlike her driven sister and mother, she has no idea what she wants to do with her life. So naturally, she starts looking for a fellow to soothe her ego and take her mind off things.  Thanks in no small part to the talented young cinematographer Jody Lee Lipes, Tiny Furniture looks as witty and surprising as its dialogue is. Not bad on a five-figure budget\u2014but surely casting and location were Dunham&amp;#039;s thriftiest moves. The loft and surrounding neighborhood we see are where she grew up. As for Nadine and Siri, they&amp;#039;re played with easy conviction by her sister, Grace, and their mother, Laurie Simmons, an acclaimed artist-photographer whose work includes, yes, very small furniture placed in unnerving relation to life-size women. (One such piece features a bride shot from the shoulders down who, lifting her skirt high, looks as if she might just have given birth to the modest gray and white ranch house between her feet.) Simmons&amp;#039; work has a transgressive edge without being obvious about it, and so does her daughter&amp;#039;s. Dunham turns in a vanity-free performance that mines Aura&amp;#039;s pudginess less for laughs than for a revelatory shock value: When was the last time you saw a plump person deftly cram herself into a Spanx-like body stocking? It has the fascination of a magic trick.  In a mainstream comedy, Aura would be the glowing beneficiary of a tidy, tension-free ending. But Lena Dunham is an original, and so is her movie. It&amp;#039;s one of Tiny Furniture&amp;#039;s cockeyed pleasures that when the closing credits roll, it would seem that nothing has changed for Aura and yet everything has\u2014and that feels just right, because even on those rare occasions when life ties itself up into a tidy bow, you can bet it will come undone in no time. And there are some especially satisfying developments along the way, including a glamorous old friend who turns out to envy Aura rather than the other way around, and two men, both cads, the second of whom is almost worth the trouble. Lucky for us, this leads to an all-time-great outlandish sex scene, which, even as we&amp;#039;re cackling in disbelief, manages to be rather hot. As with many moments in Tiny Furniture, this one has the kind of strangeness that makes the movie feel more, not less, realistic. After all, what sort of future awaits the woman who hasn&amp;#039;t looked over her shoulder at least once and thought with a bit of a thrill, &amp;quot;I did that?&amp;quot; "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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