Any one who went to a liberal arts college would understand

So I got around to watch "Frances Ha" and got a pretty good laugh,

Especially the fact that I'm narcissistic, 27, graduated from a similar liberal arts college like Frances Ha went to (Wesleyan), and have friends in Brooklyn for dance/arts installation and in NYC Midtown for finance. Kudos to the screenwriter for getting the self-deprecating hipster ironic humor down to the T and the awkward passive-aggressive "SNL-wanabe" guy's lame attempt to make a pass at Frances Ha, totally something that I'd do at school. Like the title said, if you went to a liberal arts college and majored in English, Film Studies or something artsy/bohemian, you'd understand.

IMDB's positive review seems to interpret Frances Ha as a foil to Sophie, that we were set up as the audience to view Frances Ha as irresponsible and need to grow up when it was Sophie who gave up on her dreams and self-involved, but Sophie's problems were all entirely fixable if she stuck through which she did.

However, where "Frances Ha" wasn't accurate true to life, was lack of liberal complaining about left-leaning politics and the utter hate and self-righteous moral superiority of Brooklynites have for the sell-out's (in real life, I feel like Sophie would not sell her independent womanhood to Goldman Sachs, most likely to a Senior Producer or Editor or a Director in an creative industry, to preserve at least a shred of superficial dignity). Also, the portrayal of the finance and big money types were caricatures made by artists just like techies portrayal by Hollywood in "Social Network". But I let it pass because similarly my finance/tech friends are just as dismissive of the bohemian types too.

That's though what I liked about Frances Ha, was her stubbornness to stick through and in the end, her willingness to bend to fit in her ideal with the reality and to accept and embrace partially her mediocrity and ordinariness without growing bitter/cynical as an passage from young adulthood to mature adulthood.

What I didn't like about Frances Ha was that in the end, she remains outwardly looking. Frances take a flight to Paris just to get a rise out of everyone in the wealthy party and call her friend "Abbey" to get her attention, acts quirky with the "boys in the apartment" and on the streets of New York because she feeds off it like some Zooey Deschanel character, who is overlooked when standing next to the alpha-female characters a la "Legally Blonde," but put her in a black-white film with French spoken a la "Amelie," and some lanky awkward white guy slobbering metaphorically after her, her understated swipe of the passes made although she enjoys the attention just as much. Even the ending sequence has her making a performance about her "quirkiness".

I'd have enjoyed the film much more if she confronted herself much more and admitted more her vanity/selfishness just as Sophie did. But I'm reminded by Noah Baumbach's other film "The Whale of Squid" where he also casted the children of stars who happened to attend my liberal arts college at the time where the school film archive showed the film in her honor, and the actress simply stood there at an elevated staircase("pedestal") towering the audience surveying the scene, navel-gazing.

Being a narcissist myself, I wanted a escape to a philosophical musing of my quarter-life crisis but instead got a dose of harsh reality of self-involved white people who are fixated on pursuing their "dream" and one-upping each other and frustrated that why everyone else are so selfish - cinematic justice.