Lena Dunham’s Tiny Furniture [2010] takes me back, with excruciating and pitiless attention to emotional detail, to the unquiet hell of post-collegiate ennui. I suppose this must have been the same kind of wallop the audiences of the 1960s felt when they saw Mike Nichols’ The Graduate [1967], which has now dated somewhat, although it lives on the pop cultural consciousness as a piece of cinema that had its pulse on its time. Perhaps the same thing can be said of Tiny Furniture years from now, but I have been out of college for more than a decade, and the battlegrounds sketched out by Dunham’s first film still feels fresh in its existential throbbings. I must suppose then that this film has touched on the universal. And what is this universal? Aura [played by Dunham herself] is newly-graduated from some college in the Midwest. Thrust suddenly into the real world without any inkling of what to do next, she comes home to Manhattan where she promptly forces her way back into the mother’s womb — in this case, her mother’s loft in SoHo. Aura’s mother is a successful artist, a photographer of miniature furniture which she casts in the light of her feminism, and her relationship with Aura is a tango of passive aggression coated in knowing maternalism, sweet and vicious at the same time. Aura’s sister is much younger, much thinner, and surer of herself: competitive to a fault, she mocks her older sister for her lack of substance and of ambition — and although she does not say it, for being overweight and for possessing absolutely no willingness to letting herself strive for better things. The film in fact strives to make this a point: Aura takes into her life two men who care absolutely nothing for her. One is a glib whatever of some ridiculous YouTube renown (he films himself reciting Nietzche while astride a rocking horse), and the other is a chef in the restaurant Aura works in as a “day hostess,” who ditches her on a “street corner date with,” and then proceed to… I’ll make you discover whatever happens with Aura and this chef. I make the film sound like a chore of psychological monstrosities. On the contrary. This is a film that is very funny, very witty, and does not shy away from making lovely familiarity of its subtly damaged characters. There is a scene in the end where we first see a crack into Aura’s inner world. She has climbed into her mother’s bed for the night, and they begin to talk. And then the camera slowly registers the shifting self-realizations Aura suddenly has. And somehow that is all it takes for us to know that Aura is us, that her dilemmas and problems are ours. It made me think back to those days after college when I was suddenly a holder of the terrible knowledge that my old world where I had triumphed in had closed on me, just like that. I was being told by the world that I needed to move on, to find another life. But what life was there? the younger me begged the darkness of my old bedroom as I contemplated my murky future. There was no answer from the blank white walls that stared back at me. Tiny Furniture is a reminder of those days, and now I speak of the film as a survivor who knows.