Bridget Jones Diary

By PETER CALDER

(Heradl rating: * * * * * )

The bestselling novel which Helen Fielding conjured out of a column for the Independent newspaper has a legion of fans who will be sitting in judgment on this screen version.

Not having read the book, whose target market is thirtysomething single women despairing of being lucky in love, I am powerless to warn them of the risks this adaptation has taken by tinkering with the original. Fielding shares writing credits with Four Weddings and a Funeral's Richard Curtis and House of Cards' Andrew Davies.

But only those who fail to see that films and books play by different rules will be disappointed with this beguiling romantic comedy which deserves a wide audience on the strength of its own many merits.

It's essentially a West London update of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice but - like Amy Heckerling's Clueless which similarly pirated Austen's Emma - it has an energy all its own. One of the film's many sly in-jokes is that Firth, who played the haughty Mr Darcy in the television version of Pride and Prejudice, is cast here as Mark Darcy, the man Bridget keeps failing to fall in love with.

Zellweger revels in the role of Bridget, a heartsore 32-year-old London singleton who works in a publishing firm and worries that love has passed her by.

Hobbled by worries about cellulite, cigarettes, sweets and sauvignon, she maintains an insouciant, chin-up attitude to the challenges of life as she embarks on (and fails at) self-improvement regimes.

Her faith in herself is, to judge by her actions, somewhat misplaced. When her matchmaking mother (Jones) tries to link her up with Darcy, a po-faced human rights lawyer, it's an immediate clash of temperaments and bad taste in clothing. Instead, Bridget falls for the reptilian charms of her boss, Daniel Cleaver (Grant), whose obvious caddishness makes us want to cry out the kind of warning we might issue to a pantomime damsel.

Quite how this all works out is best not revealed, though it's scarcely unpredictable. But the film's charm is in its performances. Debutante director Maguire extracts the same kind of fatal allure from Grant that Woody Allen found in Small Time Crooks, while Firth's Darcy is a good deal more textured and complicated than he first appears.

And Zellweger repays the film-makers' decision to cast a Texan as a Londoner, displaying the quite remarkable talent we saw in Jerry Maguire and Nurse Betty. From the moment we meet her, drunkenly lip-synching All By Myself into a French stick as the opening credits roll, she wins us over and never lets us go.

Her Bridget is both stereotype and utterly specific and she makes quite invisible the extraordinary level of craft that has gone into everything about the performance, from the perfect accent to the pizza-and-beer diet she adopted to put on 10 kg.

A neatly reflective subplot involving her parents' marital difficulties is animated by a great turn from Broadbent, but it's Bridget we have come to see and it's Bridget we get. She - and the film - are a knockout.

Cast: Renee Zellweger, Hugh Grant, Colin Firth, Gemma Jones, Jim Broadbent

Director: Sharon Maguire

Rating: M (sexual references)

Running time: 94 mins

Screening: Previews this weekend at Village Queen St, screens from Thursday at Village, Hoyts, Berkeley, Rialto cinemas.