Tiny Furniture is an independently made film directed by and starring Lena Durham about a young woman named Aura who is dealing with life after college while staying in her Mom's Tribeca loft. She's just been dumped by her long-term boyfriend and graduated from a unnamed college in Ohio with a degree in film theory.
The film has made a deep impression on me and not just because Aura's journey is much like my own (substituting the hip Tribeca loft with the not-so-hip rural Washington digs). The way that the film really stood out to me was that it didn't pass the reverse of The Bechdel Test; it had two men in it with names, but they never spoke to each other. Almost all of the primary case of characters in the film are women. I was completely struck by the lack of male presence in the film and the large amount of fully fleshed out female characters. After getting over my initial shock I was saddened to think that I was surprised at the amount of women in one film at all. Is it really so rare that there are large casts of women in a film? I would sadly say "yes." So I started thinking about how many films I could name that I've seen in the past couple of years that had more than two women in the main character cast:
- Bridesmaids
- The Help
- Thor
- Tiny Furniture
- Burlesque
- Black Swan
More info about Tiny Furniture is here.
