Since I borrowed my sister-in-law’s copy at the age of 14, I’ve been a huge fan of Bridget Jones’s Diary. As a teenager I wasn’t able to parse that a women in her 30s with a self-owned flat in London and a job in publishing might not be the hopeless case she was held up to be simply because she was unmarried. Back then, Bridget’s life felt distant to my own. But then Bridget Jones’s Baby premiered in 2016 when I was eight months pregnant.
My friend Maggie, who was also expecting, and I dragged our pregnant bulks to the Savoy, feeling a bit self-conscious. There was something comforting about this well-loved character embracing the same life choices as we had, like everything that lay in store for us too might now resemble a heart-warming Working Title romp, with cute dungarees and Bugaboo strollers (as opposed to bleary nights spent googling “sleep regression five months why?”).
In the fourth instalment, Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy, Bridget is now – spoilers to follow – the single mother of two school-age children. Spouse Mark Darcy has been dispatched in a suitably noble fashion (he was killed four years previously on a humanitarian aid mission to Sudan).
The film rather glosses over the financial implications of single motherhood – presumably because Mark was not only virtuous but fabulously rich – and Bridget is urged by her acerbic gynaecologist Dr Rawlings (perfectly embodied by Emma Thompson) to return to work as a way to “get back out there” as opposed to simply feed her children. I spend a disproportionate amount of the film seething with jealousy at the lavish proportions of the film set that masquerades as Bridget’s eclectically furnished period property, a stone’s throw from Hampstead Heath.
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While there is a romantic element, once more what intrigued me most was Bridget’s role as a mother. Previous books and their adaptations focused on the dating pool, casting Bridget as the everywoman in a sea of try-hard specimens: the ex-girlfriend with legs up to her neck (when Bridget’s end at the expected point), an array of glossy, Oxbridge-educated types who work in “mee-jah” and roll their eyes at what they view to be Bridget’s “cutesy, morally relativistic blind-dates-are-brilliant” approach to culture.
Just as previous instalments weighed in on women who were too ostentatiously clever or beautiful, thin or try hard, then, Mad about the Boy smacks down the mothers who try too hard to have it all or be too perfect.
Now Bridget is at sea at the private school gates with private school mummies, like “perfect Nicolette and her perfect twins Atticus and Eros”. They wear Lululemon or crisp business attire and organise the school fundraisers, all while showing off and making Bridget feel bad about herself.
In contrast, Bridget is seen dancing in carefree fashion to David Bowie’s Modern Love and bouncing on a king-size bed with her two children. They brush their teeth in a claw foot tub, mugging before a mirror, and prepare for the school drop-off in happy, fairy-winged chaos. There’s no shouting to get your homework folder or put your shoes on before leaving the charming period property for the walk to school.
You can be a working mother who loves her job, but here the only signifier of the strain this might accrue appears to be undone hair
I guiltily wonder when was the last time I staged an impromptu dance party for my child before 8am. During the pandemic as part of our daily exercise regime? Bridget is still in her pyjamas accessorised with a blazer and gets some serious side eye from the mummies at drop-off.
Some parenting scenes are reassuringly familiar – Bridget locks herself in the bathroom and screams for five minutes' peace from the clamour for screen time. But instead of giving in and surrendering the console, as I almost certainly would at this point, the next scene has her gambolling in Hampstead Heath like a modern day Julie Andrews.
Even as the film makes a point of telling us that women and mothers get so many confusing messages (In the aftermath of Mark’s death, Bridget is variously told to get back out there and to take her time, that the children must come first and to prioritise her own care etc etc) mothers are also, still being served an ideological soup.
We must not be perfect or try hard, we must be beautiful, but natural, we must be fun and youthful. We must announce our flaws on socials, provided they are the right, soft focus sorts of ones. It’s okay, for example, to be your most authentic true self and proclaim “I don’t want to be a mummy right now” as Bridget does in her beautiful downstairs bathroom, but it’s never okay to say, “I don’t want to be a mummy.”
You can be a working mother who loves her job, but here the only signifier of the strain this might accrue appears to be undone hair.
That said, seeing Bridget morph from nineties single girl to Billy and Mabel’s middle-class mummy a quarter of a century later, we might feel, as Maggie and I did that night in the Savoy, as though a part of ourselves that isn’t often seen on screen has been registered: mothering, getting older, even dealing with the pain and grief that often comes with stretch marks and wrinkles.
The response to the film has been rapturous, because middle-aged women, and particularly mothers – perfect or imperfect – don’t get much air time. However, we might also feel a bit older, but as though we’re still doing it wrong.
Like the set design for Bridget’s warm explosion of a house, this kind of perfectly imperfect vibe only looks easy. In its way, being perfectly authentic is just as hard for mothers to achieve as being perfect ever was.
