The films' credit sequence is set over delightful, giggly super-8 home movies of Mia and Alice clowning around in their new apartment to the strains of advanced supermarket music. But the truth is the film is too sweet to be cynical. Mia is a gay Laverne DeFazio, breezy and manipulative, who happily enjoys the chaos she projects into her life. What we don't get much of is depth. The genre is tried and true, of course, from Animal House to Reality Bites .
Young folk are particularly easy to typify and short-change, especially for comedies' sake.
The male characters suffer more noticeably from this treatment. Michael, the shleppy med student, remains nervous and mostly unmade. That these people all find love in the end isn't surprising, it's how small of an emotional blip it manages to register that you notice. The enthusiasm shows, but after the culmination of events and the women's party, where all things become reconciled, you realize there wasn't any real conflict to begin with. Croghan spends the entire film trying to convince us of the depth of her characters' romantic problems, only to have them laughingly resolve everything by the end.