“Bridget Jones – Mad About Him” in cinemas

Sometimes the fourth part of a film series can rise to the heights of the original in terms of quality. "The Matrix Resurrections" recently proved this; after two weaker sequels, part four returned to the level of the first part in terms of tone, character constellation and content density. "Bridget Jones: Mad About Him" ​​now shows that this opportunity also exists for comedies. When the British author Helen Fielding invented the fictional character Bridget as an alter ego for a newspaper column about single women in their thirties in the mid-1990s, she gave her a large portion of self-irony. For the book, which was created from her columns in 1996, she drew inspiration from Jane Austen and designed the love story as a modern homage to "Pride and Prejudice", in which the women have emancipated themselves financially through their own work, but are still forced into the old roles by their families and society with all kinds of expectations.

When the first film was released in 2001, Renée Zellweger , in the role of Bridget Jones, struggled with the pitfalls of an office job, flirted with her boss Daniel (Hugh Grant), and then decided to marry the rich and reserved Mr. Darcy (Colin Firth). More than twenty years later, Bridget is living as a widow (human rights lawyer Darcy died in Sudan) with her two children in London. Four years have passed since the death of her beloved husband, and she still cannot let him go. When she goes to the dinner that friends are organizing in his memory, he joins her. It becomes clear that he is just a ghost, a product of her imagination, when the butler opens the door and she stands there alone.

In the evening, she pulls her old diary out of the shelf. The last entry records the death of her husband. After four years of silence, she puts pen to paper again and continues her life. Doesn't that sound almost too sad for a comedy? (The film producers were hesitant to tackle Fielding's 2013 book of the same name for a long time because they found it too dark.) It is precisely this balance between dark themes and light humor that creates the twist that takes "Bridget Jones: Mad About Him" ​​far beyond the two slapstick predecessors.

Of course, Bridget still stumbles through life as an antihero. The spaghetti she wants to put on for the children catches fire. Nine-year-old Billy deactivates the smoke alarm so routinely that it is clear that this is not the first time he has done this. And when Bridget finally takes her children to school, a girl points to her top and asks her mother why this woman is walking around in her pajamas in broad daylight. Bridget tries her best to be a good mother - when she dances around the apartment with her daughter and son to Bowie's "Modern Love", you can see her love - but is sometimes so overwhelmed by the constant childcare that she locks herself in the bathroom. At some point, even her gynecologist (Emma Thompson plays this gynecologist as the enlightened doctor that every woman wants) advises her to look for a job again. And because we are watching a light comedy, Bridget returns to her old job as a television producer without a major application process. And a much younger park ranger (Leo Woodall) also begins to make advances to her.

The film offers fans countless references to the first part, which are lovingly updated. Bridget still meets her surrogate family of friends: the loud Shazzer now runs a podcast, the shy Jude has worked her way up to become the boss, and her gay friend Tom lives off his song royalties and is a life coach. And because romantic comedies always show the world as you want it to be, Bridget now has a close friendship with her ex-boyfriend Daniel. When she calls him in desperation, he leaves his younger model girlfriend and rushes over in a convertible to look after the children.

Hugh Grant clearly enjoys developing his role as a heartthrob into a charming silver lion whose dry sayings still work (“I showed them a video of the poetry slam and they fell asleep immediately”). But the script also allows him more depth: As a substitute uncle, he looks after the children because his son grew up without him after a failed relationship. Bridget's son talks to him for the first time about his father's death. And during a medical emergency, Daniel realizes that life as a playboy has not brought him people by his side who can support him in difficult situations.

So Bridget Jones has grown up; the problems that concern her are more serious, the humor that Zellweger always gets to the point - whether as slapstick or wordplay - has remained delicately self-ironic, and there is a bit of Jane Austen homage to boot. One of Helen Fielding's meta-jokes was to name Darcy after the hero of Pride and Prejudice in her first book - and to cast him in the film with Colin Firth , the man who played Mr. Darcy in the BBC's Austen adaptation. This film was particularly famous for a scene in which Firth climbs out of a pond with a wet shirt. The current film pays homage to this scene with a beautifully lit diving sequence to rescue a puppy in the pool during a garden party, during which Bridget's date emerges from the water as only Bond girls are allowed to do.