Just before Bridget is about to embark on a mini-break to Paris with her friends, Mark shows up to confess his love to her, but leaves when he accidentally reads the negative diary entries about him. It's a throwaway gag based on Bridget's belief that the whole world is as conscious of her weight as she is, but one that swiftly establishes the film's playful disregard for realism. There's a thin trickle of non-diegetic devices throughout. It's a narrow spectrum to work in, and both film and book pull it off by dint of unforced charm and steely old-fashioned farce. Sure, the movie could claim a certain literary pedigree since the novel was a West London update of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice.
True love wins out in the end via culinary disaster and regular bouts of public embarrassment.
Its most obvious coevals, in terms of popularity at least, are the television series Ally McBeal and Sex and the City, the latter based on a newspaper column written by Candace Bushnell just as Bridget was based on a column author Helen Fielding penned for the Independent. All concern successful career girls angsting to varying degrees over the unattainable goal of 'having it all', the surface farce merely the exposed tip of an iceberg of despair under threat from global meltdown. But it makes all the difference that Bridget is British and a single discrete story while the two others are American and ongoing series. Bridget still weighs herself in stones and what little psychobabble she espouses is treated with audible irony. But Bridget's career mishaps are as foregrounded as her relationship fiascos.