I always had a fondness for the first Bridget Jones film, Diary of Bridget Jonesliked the book by Helen Fielding and thought the film adaptation excellent and as true to the book as anyone could want. Bridget, in many ways, was every woman. She was perfect in her imperfections, slightly overweight, slightly squinty eyed, slightly neurotic, a bit man obsessed, yet expecting true love and yet at the same time, not immune to a good shag on the side herself, but at the end of the day, we all knew that Bridget loved Mark Darcy – the lovely, albeit a bit stiff in these films by character (Firth plays a human rights barrister), he nonetheless proves himself the better man over the slightly sleazy yet slightly sexy Daniel Cleaver played by, of course, Hugh Grant, who was like everyone else in the film, perfectly cast. We also saw a young woman who cared about her career and when her publishing job didn’t work out, took life by the reins and set out and found a new job in television and made herself front page news. We met a woman with depth of character who was, if not exactly like us, perhaps glints of who we are and other parts who we wanted to be and who we didn’t want to be – and this is why we loved her.
I read The Edge of Reason, the sequel to Bridget Jones’s Diary and although I didn’t connect with it as much, although it seemed somewhat forced, it was entertaining enough and had an atmosphere all of its own, and that was it. The first Bridget Jones film had this in credible atmosphere that perfectly captured what it meant to be thirty-something and single and living in your own space and working the daily grind. Anyone who has done that or is doing that knows what it means and could identify with Bridget. She was the blonde you could love, and Renee Zellwegger had a convincing British accent despite her American southern roots, so good in fact, that I was surprised to find out that she was even American, not knowing her too well from previous films (or perhaps not recognizing her with the extra weight she gained for the role and the accent change). Everything about the first film struck me as authentic, even the things that were not authentic.
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