Bridget Jones Diary can essentially be seen as a film made by women for women. By using Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice as an inspiration, the makers try to evoke the old-fashioned romance of the past. Bridget Jones Diary has a female director, Sharon Maguire, and its three producers were all women, as well as the script supervisor (Helen Fielding, the novelist herself). Bridget Jones Diary belongs to the woman’s film genre, which can be defined by the “centrality of its female protagonist, its attempt to deal with issues deemed important to women and its address to a female audience” (Hollinger, 2002).
Returning to the Classics
In the 1990s there was a great increase in women’s involvement in the film industry, as well as an increase in the number of female stars involved in film production. These developments changed the film industry, and one of the women induced results was that the film industry underwent a ‘return to the classics’ movement. Classic woman’s literature was used as a source of female-centred plots of characters, and the films were, to a large extent, directed towards women. “This new women’s ‘return to the classics’ movement relies heavily upon female film-makers not only to push to get the films into production, but also for a refashioning of their nineteenth-century heroines in accord with twentieth-century feminist ideas, recapturing, for a contemporary female audience, the distinctive voices of prominent women of the past, either real or fictional.” (Hollinger, 2002)
An important part of why the image of Bridget Jones Diary became so successfull is that part of its strength is derived from a likeness to Jane Austen’s novel. Many parallels can be found between Bridget Jones Diary and Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, because Helen Fielding based her novel (on which, in turn, the movie was based on) on this 19th century masterpiece. The leading males have the same names, they are both called Mr. Darcy, and have the same character traits. The relationship of Daniel Cleaver to Mark Darcy (in Bridget Jones Diary) parallels the relationship of George Wickham to Fitzwilliam Darcy (in Pride and Prejudice). Also noticeable are the similarities in personality between Bridget's and Elizabeth Bennet's (the protagonist in Pride and Prejudice) mothers and fathers. Colin Firth, who playes Fitzwilliam Darcy in the 1995 BBC adaptation of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, is also casted to play Mark Darcy in Bridget Jones Diary (Wikipedia).
Pride and Prejudice
Bridget Jones Diary
An Old Fashioned Love Story
Frank Krutnik writes that the current trend in the woman film genre is that it invokes the old-fashioned romance of the past. These films are seeking to bridge the gap between the past and present, “identifying love as something from a long-lost era that needs to be validate their ideal of romantic intimacy, the new romances insinuate that rather than being something that simply happens between people, love is essentially the product of aesthetic fabrication” (Krutnik, 2002). William Paul writes that “one of the most powerful conventions of romantic comedy in the past is the sense of spiritual grace in romance”. When this sense of spiritual grace in romance is combined with contemporary issues, and marketed correctly, it usually becomes successful. For example, Pretty Woman of 1990, cleverly manipulates the old and new conventions, but retains the spiritual grace in romance (Paul, 2002). In the climax of this film the prince (a millionair) climbs a tower (a flat) to rescue the princess (a hooker), in a fairy tale set in modern day Hollywood.
Bridget Jones Diary tries to invoke the old-fashioned romance of the past, by using Austen’s Pride and Prejudice as an inspiration. However, the film is obviously set in the 1990s, and clearly shows the struggle of a woman trying to make sense of her professional and romantic life in the post-feminist era. A good example of this is one of the last scenes of the movie. Bridget Jones and Mark Darcy are standing outside in the snow kissing, in a classical Hollywood way. Bridget, a woman of the 1990s, is only wearing sneakers, a tanktop and a pair of tigerprint panties (as she had to run after Mark after a misunderstanding), and Mark Darcy is covering her up with his jacket. This exact contrast, of an independant woman in tigerprint panties finding classical romance, is what makes this film so successful.
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Hall, S.
(2002). Tall Revenue Features: The Genealogy of the Modern Blockbuster. In S. Neale (Ed.), Genre and Contemporary Hollywood. London: British Film Institute.
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Hollinger, K.
(2002). From Female Friends to Literary Ladies: The Contemporary Woman’s Film. In S. Neale (Ed.), Genre and Contemporary Hollywood. London: British Film Institute.
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Krutnik, F.
(2002). Conforming Passions?:Contemporary Romantic Comedy. In S. Neale (Ed.), Genre and Contemporary Hollywood. London: British Film Institute.
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Neale, S.
(2002). Genre and Contemporary Hollywood. London: British Film Institute.
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Paul, W.
(2002). The Impossibility of Romance: Hollywood Comedy, 1978-1999. In S. Neale (Ed.), Genre and Contemporary Hollywood. London: British Film Institute.
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www.wikipedia.com