The concluding scene of the latest, and final, Bridget Jones movie, soon to be at a cinema near you, is set at a New Year’s Eve party in Bridget’s home. Minor spoiler alert, but Bridget is now a widowed mother with two young children, and here we see her surrounded by family, long-time friends, former lovers and work colleagues.
It’s a joyous and funny and moving finale to the film, a tableau full of love and reconciliation, shared connection and companionship, and we are invited to luxuriate in the comfort that these simple, uninhibited pleasures in life can bring. Without labouring the point, it acts on a subconscious level as a particularly pertinent contrast to the complications and perplexities of the modern world.
The guests at the party, we know, have a shared history, and we, the audience, feel the same with this cast of characters. We have known Bridget most of our adult life – she emerged as a fictional diarist in The Independent back in 1995 and the first of this series of four movies was in 2001 – and now, as we say farewell to her, the temptation to look back on our own lives, to feel the glow of nostalgia and possibly the pain of grief, is too much to resist.
It is a powerful force, and around me at last night’s premiere, people were sobbing tears – for times past, loves lost and lives lived, for friendships old and new. As Bridget’s best friend tells the gathering at the party: “I’ll be honest. I don’t know what I’d have done in the past 20 years without you lot.”
“We’ve had some f**king fun though, haven’t we?” comes the response. “We have,” they agree.
At this point, the audience is not sure whether it’s the characters talking, or the ensemble cast, which includes Renée Zellweger, Hugh Grant, Colin Firth, Emma Thompson and Sally Phillips. Either way, it’s an authentic sentiment, and rather like the TV series Gavin and Stacey did in its denouement on Christmas Day, this recognition of the passing of time leads the viewer to a more reflective mood, to consider the importance of enduring friendship, the pleasure of shared experiences and, above all, the essential requirement for the human spirit of simply having a good time.
An astonishing 20.9 million people watched the finale of Gavin and Stacey, and I have no doubt that Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy will have a similar impact when it goes on general release on the eve of Valentine’s Day.
Neither of these works can be considered escapism, for they are very much rooted in the real world. But it’s a world in which politics – in its prosaic sense – rarely intrudes, and, as such, we are transported to a place where the only things that matter are people’s relationships, their everyday concerns, their shifting priorities.
There is something very British about the way in which the characters are permitted to develop, and indeed age. Bridget goes from singleton to single mother, while we see Stacey transform from carefree young woman to a mother of three. Compare an American series of equal longevity: Bart Simpson will remain a 10-year-old boy forever, while the plot of Friends rarely embraced the realities of getting older during the show’s decade-long run.
Bridget Jones, however, has had a life. A proper life that is relatable, and connective and, to all intents, real. Those of us who were on The Independent when Helen Fielding was writing her Wednesday column in the voice of this single girl about town could not have imagined the impact she would have on our culture, on our lives.
Yet there we were 30 years later, weeping in the dark as she sang “Auld Lang Syne”. We will miss you, Bridget Jones.
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