Bridget Jones’s Baby is a movie that delivers everything that seasoned Bridget Jones fans are after – as long as you enter the cinema with below average expectations, anticipating the formulaic plotline of a woman, desperate for a man, who will only able to achieve happiness by having a child, then you’ll leave happy.

Sadly, the film adheres to popular mainstream cinema’s tendency to represent women as only able to find fulfilment and validation in their lives by sourcing a male counterpart, becoming pregnant and raising a child. At one point in the film, the character of Bridget Jones goes so far as to say something along the lines of, “I used to feel empty, but now I have this little being growing inside of my tummy. I’ve found purpose and happiness in my life.” Whilst the film does much to subvert previous cinematic stereotypes, such as the token same-sex couple, it also perpetuates to viewers that without a child, females are essentially directionless and lack meaning in their lives.

Although the art of cinema has been greatly developed over the last century-and-a-bit of its prominence, the heroine is still all too often reliant on her hero. Even with a prominent talent like Renée Zellweger, the women is still characterised as unfulfilled until such time as they are domestically stable, adhering to current gender representations in Hollywood.

Woman have been hoping to see this norm abandoned since its beginning, and whilst steps have been taken, features such as Bridget Jones are all too obvious reminders that change needs to happen faster.