Exalt her as a feminist icon, or decry her obsession with “having a bottom the size of Brazil” as fuel for several decades-worth of body-shaming hysteria – it doesn’t really matter, Bridget Jones is ours. She belongs to the culture, for all the good and toxic thinking she represents. And she has been since 1995, when Helen Fielding first started publishing her column about the Chardonnay-guzzling, chain-smoking perpetual singleton in the pages of The Independent.
And it’s in that sense of ownership – that she’s our Bridget – that her latest cinematic venture, Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy, succeeds where previous sequels have fallen face-first, perhaps into a musical festival mud pit à la Bridget Jones’s Baby (2016). She’s more vulnerable here, more honest, and a touch less defined by her frazzled quirks. That’s thanks, in part, to the fact it’s based on Fielding’s third book in the series, which draws from the author’s own experiences of grief in order to explore a Bridget (Renée Zellweger) who exists beyond Mark Darcy (Colin Firth) and Daniel Cleaver (Hugh Grant).
