In the prologue to his book “Age of Ambition,” Evan Osnos of The New Yorker declared that China is going through the age of the changeling, when the daughter of a farmer can propel herself from the assembly line to the boardroom so fast that she never has time to shed the manners and anxieties of the village. He compared China today to America during its “Guilded Age,” when in 1850 the New World had fewer than twenty millionaires and by 1900 it had 40,000.

Angry at being single, the heroine bottles a guy who takes her out to dinner.

If romantic comedy “Meet Miss Anxiety” 《我的早更女友》 is anything to go by, China is developing even faster than Osnos thinks. Just a few decades ago, the only movies that could be made in the People’s Republic were those espousing socialist values to the population which was almost entirely made up of peasant farmers. Now China is making movies with characters who are every bit as spoiled, irritating and emotionally immature as their counterparts in U.S. sitcom “Friends.”

If you find it difficult to sympathize with a 26 year-old menopausal woman whose idea of an act of love is to hijack a wedding in a way which wouldn’t disgrace Heath Ledger’s Joker in “The Dark Knight,” then “Meet Miss Anxiety” is not the movie for you.

The premise of having a rom-com with a violent, alcoholic tomboy as the heroine is interesting in a stick two fingers up at the box office kind of way. However, leading lady Zhou Xun appears to have turned into the Chinese Jenifer Aniston. Her movies all take place in a parallel universe in which attractive but clumsy women who are unlucky in love always discover in the end that the guy for them was under their nose all along. Needless to say, the movie is already a commercial success.

On her graduation day Qi Jia (Zhou Xun) shows up in a wedding dress and climbs on to the stage to recite her vows to her boyfriend (Wallace Cheung who, unlike in Han Han’s “The Continent”, is one of the less annoying characters). After being rejected, Qi becomes a hotheaded alcoholic who lives in a moderately expensive apartment in Xiamen with college classmates Yuan Xiao’ou (Tong Dawei, who apparently is supposed to be the male equivalent of a homely girl next door) and her more worldly, sexually active best friend (played by Zhang Zilin).

On her way toward finding true love, Qi Jia attacks her doctor with a cactus, attempts to bottle a chef at a restaurant where the service is too slow and treats a rape flower field as a public toilet. When her attempt to win back her old flame fails, she looks to Yuan Xiao’ou and considers whether he will do.

Like the “American Pie” franchise, which has about the same amount of depth and subtlety, this movie is interesting from a sociological point-of-view. There is no mention of the characters’ parents – like in “Friends” the key relationships in their lives are those with roommates. If the parents aren’t a source of income for the main characters then it is not clear what is. It is over an hour before there is any suggestion as to what any of them do for a living and the two main female characters (both of whom are single) are never seen doing any work.

This movie should be shown to every Western politician who is espousing clichés about the formidable rise of China. It could also show another side of society to those who only associate China with hellish working conditions and Blade Runner skylines. However, as a piece of entertainment, this reviewer found few uses for it.