At first look, Bridget Jones’s Baby, the third installment of the series, looks highly suspicious. Sequels and prequels are the order of the day for studios to ensure guaranteed hits, even the decidedly average ones, and this particular film comes after a 12-year hiatus, but a few minutes into the film, you’re pleasantly surprised. The curse of the sequel which we witnessed in Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason (2004) has been wiped out, with Sharon Maguire who has returned to the director’s chair, to offer sincere charm and those flushed cheeks that made Renée Zellweger a darling of the masses.
But the Bridget we knew so far, the lovable accident-prone girl who had a traumatic relationship with her body weight, has made way for a sleeker older woman, not necessarily wiser, past the clock of 40, celebrating her birthday alone in her apartment. It seems everyone is making babies, adopting babies or bringing them up, and she has been left alone.
So her single and ready-to-mingle friend and co-worker Miranda (a sexy turn by Sarah Solemani) takes her to a weekend music festival, where she falls headlong in mud, is rescued by a stranger, fails to recognise Ed Sheeran, and ends up with the same stranger in his tent that night, and of course, his bed. But she is Bridget, and trouble can’t be too far. She meets her ex, Mark Darcy (Colin Firth) at a function later, and one thing leads to another yet again. Soon, two lines on a pee stick and our girl is pregnant. As you can guess, she doesn’t know who the father is.
The thing about this plot is that it’s absolutely chick lit on the surface, but it’s the detailing that makes it stand on its own feet, at a vast distance from numb and number ideas of love and sex. Emma Thompson co-writes the script with Dan Mazer (of Borat fame) and the character’s creator Helen Fielding, and has a hilarious turn as Bridget’s doctor, with witty lines to boot.
Bridget Jones managed to catch popular imagination because it re-imagined Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice by turning the characters on their heads, by making the haughty Elizabeth Bennett a bumbling ‘big’ girl with lavish clumsiness in the judgmental new world. By infusing comic elements with situational sweep, it created a woman character who isn’t your righteous heroine, but a confused broad that you can relate to and abundantly love. Though media’s cursive sexism hasn’t failed to question Zellweger’s appearance since the debut of the film’s trailer, if you watch the film, you’d know she’s still the same old perplexed Bridget, not sure whether to celebrate her sexual fervor or to figure out the depositor of the sperm that’s about to change her life. A face used as a canvas of ambiguous emotions, and her cheeks, continuously flushing, and that yet-to-figure-out-what’s-happening glint in her eyes, it is Zellweger’s convincing performance that anchors the whole narrative.
Colin Firth seems wooden at first, but slowly settles into his role as he returns as Bridget’s former beau, emerging from the ruins of a marriage, and readying for fatherhood. Hugh Grant remains conspicuously absent, but Patrick Dempsey as the smooth-talking American billionaire stranger who’s a probable father to Bridget’s child more than makes up for it.
This is a broad comedy that works as well as the first one, and the characters are never sacrificed at the altar for slapstick gags. It’s accessible, and wears its affections on its sleeves.
But there’s just a little odd hitch. Bridget, in her career, is a television news show producer, and she actually delivers a speech on the integrity of journalism. But in the same film, she fails to recognise an Asian personality (perhaps they all look similar, eh?) and can’t get another foreigner’s name correct. Talk about irony.
(The writer is a journalist and a screenwriter who believes in the insanity of words, in print or otherwise. Follow him on Twitter: @RanjibMazumder)
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