This is Lena Dunham’s first effort — as writer, director and star of the film — and it grows on you, largely because it doesn’t ever do the obvious thing. It’s funny and apposite at the same time, and that’s never an easy trick.
She plays Aura, a sullen young woman, home with her mother and sister in New York after university and without either a job or a boyfriend. She lopes around the apartment half naked, has a peculiar kind of liaison with a perky but silly best friend from school and a Jewish boy who is as hopelessly indecisive as she is. Nothing really works out and, for her, life is an emotional fog that will probably never entirely clear.
The story will be instantly recognised by anyone who has wondered what life is about once the process of education is completed and nothing works out as we are told it should. Dunham, who lights up the screen, has a future somewhere — which is more than can be said for the young woman she plays.
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