Imagine you’re a fetus. You have a set amount of months to be a fetus, and you’re just waiting, being force-fed whatever already-eaten nourishment comes your way, unable to see beyond the fleshy walls of your prison, unable to move beyond a couple of useless kicks here and there, unable to communicate (if you even had something to communicate with), unable to understand the mildly amusing British banter about New Year’s resolutions, Christmas jumpers, Auntie Una’s gherkins, or bunny costumes. You’re just waiting.
In the new trailer for Bridget Jones’s Baby, it seems the titular character is for most of the film unborn and unseen, except for when an ultrasound reveals it lurking — as amorphous lumps and fold — behind the walls of a familiar person named Bridget Jones (who’s actually being embodied by someone named Renee Zellweger).
The fetus does not know who its father is, nor what a father is, despite the fact that the voice outside of it seems to be searching for the answer to that very question — but what even is a question? A fetus does not know. It cannot understand that its mother and Mark Darcy — who once wore funny Christmas jumpers and was once an asshole to its mother and then wasn’t an asshole, but then maybe was an asshole again, because they’re now exes — rekindled their flame for one brief night, and that meanwhile, its mother was also kindling a flame with [whomever Patrick Dempsey is playing], nor does it know that a Kindle is also a small rectangle that worried the literary world for a while.
It might, however, know that Darcy (Colin Firth) and Dempsey are competing for fatherhood and potentially its mother’s affection — this it could perhaps deduce from the fact that its innards are being drenched in both iced tea (a small gift from Darcy) and super-juice (a slightly one-upping gift from Dempsey). It does not know that a similar form of competition arose between Darcy and a sleazy publishing mogul of a Hugh Grant in the first movie about its mother.
It does not know that Emma Thompson happens to be its mother’s prenatal care doctor (which is a shame, because she’s very talented, and that’s very reassuring). It does not know that its film premieres on September 16, or that a new trailer, revealing some of the things it does not know above, has been released, and can be viewed below. No, all is dark, strange, blurry. Soon it will be born. What will it make of the world? What will it make of Bridget? What will it make of Brexit?