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The Conversation
Lifestyle
Mary Harrod, Professor of French and Screen Studies, University of Warwick

Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy – our favourite frazzled English woman is back but life’s more complicated

Bridget Jones, the endearingly chaotic heroine who is unlucky in love, is back – but not as many might expect. This is the fourth Bridget Jones film, which adapts the story of the third book in Helen Fielding’s much-loved series (the third film, Bridget Jones’s Baby, was based on the fourth book).

When Bridget Jones’s Diary came out in 2001, our heroine’s low-level eating disorder, neediness and alcohol abuse associated female singlehood with mental instability. In this new instalment, we see an older Bridget with more mature concerns.

The woman we meet in the long opening pre-credit sequence of Mad About The Boy is frazzled, manic and, as we’ve seen Bridget before, given to long bouts on the sofa communing with a bottle of white wine. However, this time she’s not down because love eludes her but because she had a wonderful love and lost it. Our once bubbly singleton has been reconfigured as a subdued widow with two young kids.

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