In The Self-Love Era, Bridget Jones’s Highly Relatable Neuroses Are A Tonic (2024)

Bridget Jones is back – and thank God, because, tell you what I haven’t heard in a while? A long, meandering pub monologue about how no one could really afford to live alone in a two-storey flat in Borough Market, especially on a publishing salary, not even in the 2000s. Now my slightly warm pinot grigios can once again be soundtracked by friends of friends I didn’t know were experts in the central London property market circa 2001, telling me in great depth about how unrealistic a fictional character’s life is. What? I had no idea?

Confirmed this week, film four – Bridget Jones: Mad About The Boy – is expected to be loosely based on Helen Fielding’s novel of the same name. Once again starring Renée Zellweger in the titular diary-writing, cigarette-huffing role, it’ll follow Jones in her fifties as she has a bloody nightmare with online dating, social media and complicated TV remotes. Hugh Grant’s Daniel Cleaver will be back! Colin Firth’s Mark Darcy is dead! (A concept many fans are struggling with, but unfortunately death does come for us all, even posh, socially awkward lawyers.) And Bridget will have a much younger boyfriend played by Leo Woodall, star of One Day, sporter of delightfully floppy fringes and, let’s just say what everyone’s thinking here, Hugh Grant 2.0. (Is this movie the passing of the mantle from one sexy British heartthrob to his successor? Perhaps, but I personally feel like Hugh’s really come into his own in the Paddington franchise, so maybe he’s still got a few good years left in him.)

Anyway, back on topic! To me, the return of BJ is tremendous news, which is not something I’d have written if I hadn’t happened to watch Bridget Jones, the original, on a flight with very limited entertainment options recently. Before those 97 minutes, immersed in Y2K London with just a watery orange juice and tiny bag of Penn State Sour Cream & Chive for company, I remembered the film basically as an extended advert for diet culture: an hour and a half of filmmakers pointing at Zellweger, screaming things like, “Look! This previously very slim woman ate 20 donuts a day to get big enough to play a woman whose main characteristic is her humongous size, despite weighing less than the average British woman!” or, “Wow, you’re in your thirties? Shouldn’t you be at home sucking on Werther’s Originals and liking Facebook posts about when bin men were bin men?”

I’d kind of forgotten it had a plot. (In case you need a refresher: 32-year-old “singleton”, Bridget, is getting hounded by her family to stop spending so much time drinking vodka with her arguably dysfunctional, inarguably hilarious friends and start settling down; she falls into a ropey situationship with her horny, somewhat predatory boss, Daniel, but also develops feelings for family friend and good-guy lawyer Mark; and while all of this is happening, she’s writing a diary that’s quite heavily focused on her weight, how many cigarettes she’s smoked and her latest embarrassing mishaps at work.) I hadn’t remembered that it was genuinely funny and actually has a lot to say about the absolute nonsense that comes with being a woman. In my head, it only really existed in the form of one of those deeply earnest listicles about its most problematic moments. Now that I’ve rewatched it, though? I’d argue that the film has been unfairly maligned by many of us as an irredeemable relic of the Noughties, lumped into the same Avoid Watching at All Costs category as Love Actually (genuinely terrible), when it actually deserves a spot alongside Sex and the City in the Definitely Contains Dubious Moments but Is Also Entertaining and Relatable Enough To Make It Worth Your Time bracket.

I should flag here that I’m absolutely not saying the film doesn’t have major problems. (Could anything have been moulded into form in the hell-like Noughties without it being in some way… a bit weird? I’ve certainly spent thousands of pounds on therapy for that very reason.) There are some lighthearted references to sexual harassment in there, Bridget and Daniel’s relationship is, er, inappropriate to say the least, and, as someone who has never weighed less than Bridget for as long as I’ve been weighing myself, the character’s detailed analysis of every pound she gains or loses gave me, like many other women, a yardstick to beat myself up with for decades.