Bridget Jones’s Baby: Are paternity test plotlines implicitly critical of women?

This well-worn story upholds a sexist myth that many men are being cuckolded into raising children who biologically are not their own, writes Matilda Battersby

Renée Zellweger plays the mother-to-be in the latest Bridget Jones movie (Rex)

Bridget Jones is back. She’s 43, and having a baby. And isn’t sure who the father is.

Renée Zellweger is so good that the film is guaranteed to be a major box-office hit. When I saw it, people were laughing so hard I heard an actual snort from three rows back.

Watching the film was enjoyable. It wasn’t like enduring Sex and the City 2, which felt as if two hours of my life had been brutally snatched. It was fun and funny, and made me nostalgic for the Nineties; for the halcyon days of Chardonnay and Marlboro Lights. When being single was something to be derided openly.

Bridget Jones’s Baby, the third in the film franchise based on Helen Fielding’s novels, has arrived 12 years after the last one. An older Bridget is more in control: she has a good job, reliable friends and more godchildren than you could wish to babysit for. And (without giving away more than the trailer) she accidentally gets knocked up thanks to some eco-friendly condoms and can’t be sure whether her old flame Mark Darcy (Colin Firth) or new love interest Jack (Patrick “McDreamy” Dempsey) is the baby’s father.

There’s something extremely uncomfortable about this set-up. It is a new take on the age-old soap story drama: one woman, one baby, two potential fathers. It is an extremely polite version of this kind of story arc. There is no Kat Slater-from-EastEnders-style screaming revelations of parentage. Emma Thompson is there as everybody’s ideal sort of obstetrician, asking Bridget gaily to “bring the father along, if you can work out which one he is”.

While the audience is carried off on this light-hearted journey through conception, pregnancy, birth and parental revelation, there is an awkward – and far from plausible – sense of how nice everyone is being to each other during a deeply difficult time. Both potential dads want to be the daddy. They both seem to want Bridget. They don’t care who lied to whom. In soap-land there would be a punch-up at the very least, murder at worst.

And that’s where Hollywood seems to deviate from the grittier, television model when it comes to paternity issues. From Mamma Mia! to The Switch and Three Men And A Baby, instead of becoming messy, emotional and badly-behaved, Hollywood films are full of noble, well-intentioned men who appear to work through jealousy or betrayal to be the daddy, whatever It takes.

It is a departure from the Mark Darcy/Daniel Cleaver good man/bad boy conflict that has worked so well up to now in the Bridget Jones oeuvre. “It’s interesting that they’re both nice guys,” Firth said in a recent interview. “Because traditionally one of them was devilish, and that’s where his charm lies. While the other ones, constipated, but morally upstanding.” As Zellweger says: “It’s not a bad dilemma.”

The fact that they both desperately want to be the father of Bridget’s baby is a lovely, cuddly set of events. It is heartwarming. But the paternity test plotline is well-trodden narrative ploy, and some women argued when the test first became widely available that it was anti-feminist because it meant rather than taking a woman’s word for it a man could demand scientific proof. A recent study by a Belgian university estimated that one in 50 British fathers are raising a child which they believe to be biologically theirs but isn’t.

The author of the research found this number to be considerably lower than predicted and claimed his findings debunked sexist social stereotypes that heterosexual women feel an “evolutionary imperative to have multiple male partners to increase fertility rates, but do not inform the partners”.

Report author Maarten Larmuseau said: “Media and popular scientific literature often claim that many alleged fathers are being cuckolded into raising children who biologically are not their own. Surprisingly, the estimated rates within human populations are quite low – around 1 or 2 per cent.”

This is a stereotype that films such as Bridget Jones’s Baby play into adroitly. Bridget might have evolved from a haphazard, thirty-something eternal singleton into a slightly less hopeless forty-something pregnant lady. But she remains in need of rescuing – and is still obsessed with developing inner poise about not having a boyfriend, in order to obtain a boyfriend.

That her white knight might be one of two potential men is an example of Hollywood presenting an overly generous male stereotype compared with a female one that carries a subtext suggesting she just might be a slut. When Bridget’s mother (a brilliant Gemma Jones) hears of her daughter’s predicament, she shrieks: “Did you have a three-way?!” The sentiment is as out-of-date as her mother’s twinset and pearls.

So welcome back, Bridget. Your diary might now be an iPad, but you haven’t otherwise evolved to meet the modern world. As a “geriatric mother” (technical term), you’re unlikely to die alone and be found three weeks later half-eaten by Alsations. Which is progress, of sorts.