Head over Heels

Sarah Solemani | Harper's Bazaar UK - October 2016

As Bridget Jones returns to the screen, its new cast member Sarah Solemani  explains why we love a heroine who keeps slipping up explains why we love a heroine who keeps slipping up .

It’s really hard to fall. In comedy. It appears effortless, the skid on the banana skin, the lean through the open bar hatch, the tilt off the chair but, believe me, it’s not easy. For a woman to perfect a good comic fall it takes, on average, 2,000 years. No exaggeration. There’s the physical aspect, of course. Specialist stuntmen are called in – they have conversations about where to put the mats. Camera angles have to be considered. A mark is chalked on the floor, you’re told which elbow to land on, how high to lift your face. In the guise of Bridget Jones, Renée Zellweger has performed some spectacular falls. 

Zellweger is superb at falling. It’s a major reason why I, like virtually everybody else, love Bridget so much. But it’s being able to fall that takes so long; the politics of the fall, if you like. From the Ancient Greeks onwards, drama and comedy offer very little in the way of women’s roles, and hardly any of them let us trip up in such comic fashion. Shakespeare’s women mostly soliloquise about their distant men, before disappearing into the shadows. The advent of film introduced a few famous female fallers: Lucille Ball took a good tumble; the Ab Fab girls have plenty of drunken slips; and there’s the famous scene in Sex and the City with Carrie and the lake. But name me another global comic franchise in which a woman gets to fall? In fact, name me another global comic franchise with a British woman at the helm?

There’s only Bridget Jones – she’s the only one we have. To fall in comedy is to fall at life. It is to feel disappointed, inadequate, lonely and not without shame. These are the reasons we cherish Bridget, far over the weight struggles, the smoking, the boy trouble or the other petty, ‘girlie’ things we are often accused of worrying about. We cherish Bridget Jones because if she can collapse into the earth and sink for a moment, before lifting her head, taking a breath, smoothing down the bunny outfit and entering the party, then maybe we can too.