The fourth instalment of the Bridget Jones’s Diary series is out next month, and the original from 2001 has not aged well. It is rife with sexism, casual groping of women is no big deal, and neither are racist comments about Bosnian and Japanese people.
Daniel Cleaver (played by Hugh Grant) who is Bridget’s original boss, begins their flirtation by emailing that he is deeply concerned about her skirt, which seems to have been absent from work today. He pressures her into having dinner while making it clear that his intentions are “full sex”.
There is another manager called Fitzherbert who never raises his eyes to Bridget’s face, preferring to focus on her chest, and a creepy neighbour whom she has to call Uncle G, who fondles her rear end. Her new boss in television assures her that no one gets fired at Sit Up Britain for shagging the boss. It makes you thankful that a manager pressuring a junior colleague for sex can no longer be played for laughs.
But if I had to choose between rewatching it and the so-called “hottest film of the year”, Babygirl, I think I might pick Bridget Jones.
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Critics have been gushing about Babygirl since it premiered with a seven-minute standing ovation at the Venice Film Festival. They praise Nicole Kidman’s courage, openness and vulnerability, and the hotness of the young costar, Harris Dickinson.
Babygirl’s rave reviews included “an enjoyable liberation story of a kind” (New York Times) and a challenger “for the sexiest film of the year” (Washington Post).
There are spoilers ahead but honestly, the trailer spills most of the plot. Romy Mathis (Nicole Kidman) is a Botox-ed and pastel-suited chief executive of a warehouse robotics company. She has an apparently idyllic upper-class lifestyle with an adoring theatre director husband and two sweet, quirky daughters.
Despite her on-screen husband, Jacob, being played by Antonio Banderas, she has suffered from 19 years of sexual frustration, relieved only by masturbating frantically to sub/dom porn. Enter what my mother would have called a young pup, Samuel (Dickinson) who is interning at her company. Director Halina Rejin says that Samuel represents Gen Z, their confidence and lack of respect for authority. She should perhaps apologise to Gen Z, because he is rude, has no idea of boundaries, and quickly exploits his intuition that Remy has a burning desire to be treated like a dog.
That is literally true because she first encounters him when he subdues an out-of-control Alsatian on the street and ever after, the motif of dog and master recurs right to the closing sequence.
When do we get female-centric sexuality that does not fetishise male dominance?
I’m sorry, but how did we get here, where a successful woman’s deepest desire is to lick milk from a saucer on the floor under orders from her intern? While there are no acts of physical violence in the film, being degraded is central. Not to mention Samuel dancing shirtless to George Michael’s Father Figure, with lyrics like “I will be your father figure/Put your tiny hand in mine/I will be your preacher teacher/Anything you have in mind.” Why does a grown woman need a father figure who chides her for her coffee intake and calls her a good girl?
How is this a great feminist triumph? Bridget Jones could not be fulfilled without a man and now Romy Mathis cannot be fulfilled without being bedded by a dog-subduing intern. When do we get female-centric sexuality that does not fetishise male dominance?
This film is the natural outgrowth of the mainstreaming of porn, which Romy watches and which Samuel has absorbed as a primer. While mostly obnoxious, he occasionally reveals how lost he is in an amoral universe and worries about being evil.
“What we do is normal, so long as it is consensual,” he still insists. For all his talk about consent and safe words, he is still not above threatening her entire career to get her to resume their sexual encounters.
Bridget Jones’s Diary is a fantasy where two rich professional men fight in the street and trash an Italian restaurant because of rivalry about a woman – and walk away consequence-free. Despite being hailed as daring and bringing back sex to the cinema, Babygirl is an even bigger fantasy.
It suggests that a fiftysomething chief executive can indulge her desires with a much younger colleague and walk away consequence-free. At the end of the film, Romy is finally able to achieve sexual satisfaction with her husband. That might have been possible 19 years before if she had communicated with him, or God forbid, had marriage counselling. In real life, her blameless husband would likely file for divorce and Romy would end up fighting for even partial custody of their children.
Halina Rejin declares that she wanted to see a woman on film explore her sexuality without punishment, without anyone being a villain. But if Jacob had explored his sexuality with a young woman, how thrilled and forgiving would Romy be? Bridget Jones’s Diary is a wish-fulfilment fantasy about being liked just as you are. Babygirl is a wish-fulfilment fantasy that sexual infidelity is fine and there is no dark side to expressing any aspect of sexuality.
