Parenting

No Time to Die: finally, we get to see Bond in a relatable predicament. Sort of


First, as if you need to be told, there are spoilers here. If you haven’t watched No Time to Die, don’t read this. Reading this will ruin everything. Go away and do something else until you’ve seen the film. This is your final warning.

It had long been predicted that, in No Time to Die, James Bond would become a father. And it turns out the predictions were partially correct. Technically, Bond did become a father in No Time to Die, but it happened during the long five-year ellipsis that took place during the opening credits. Bond knocked up Madeleine Swann, then went through an extended period of pouty estrangement, and only clapped eyes on his daughter after their fraught reunion.

Also, Bond is only partially a father. He knows his daughter for just a handful of hours. And – given that in that time she gets run off the road, shot at, kidnapped, shown around a literal poison factory and then has to watch her biological father get his body blown to smithereens by a flurry of exploding missiles – they’re likely to be the very worst hours she will ever experience in her entire life.

Or maybe not because, by all accounts, Mathilde doesn’t seem to possess any identifiably human traits. She greets the arrival of her father with the same passively blank expression that she witnesses his death. She sits in the back seat during a car chase as obliviously as she would if she was stuck at some traffic lights. When it’s her bedtime, her mother tells her to close her eyes and she immediately falls asleep. Imagine that. Imagine bedtime not being a grinding three-hour nightmare of bribery, deflection and persuasion.

Mathilde reacts in the same way when Bond – in the one moment of actual parenting he will do in his lifetime – peels her an apple for breakfast. If she was a real child, she would have looked at the apple, flung it to the ground and screamed “I WANT HARIBO!” But no, she just quietly eats the apple. It’s this behaviour, along with her nebulous age (technically five, written as a three-year-old, has the missing teeth of a seven-year-old) that makes me believe that she is actually an AI-style android bought by Swann in the depths of her remorse to lend her life some meaning.

Teething troubles? ... Daniel Craig, left, as 007 with love interest Madeleine Swann (Léa Seydoux)
Teething troubles? … Daniel Craig, left, as 007 with love interest Madeleine Swann (Léa Seydoux) Photograph: MGM/Universal Pictures/Eon/Danjaq/Nicola Dove/Allstar

As to what sort of father Bond is, I’m a little on the fence. True, the sight of him tucking Mathilde’s toy into his braces is one of the most tender moments in 007 history. But at the same time his dying sentiment is one of egotism; he notes with pride that she looks like him.

Perhaps it’s best that Bond perishes at the end of No Time to Die, then. He gets to experience just a surface-level flash of what parenthood is like. Anything more than that would ruin the character entirely. We’ll never have to see Bond sitting at a soft play centre in an industrial estate, or wiping crusted baked bean juice from his cargo shorts after a badly thought-out trip to a cafe. He’ll never accept a mission on the proviso that he has to sort out emergency childcare first, or try to infiltrate an enemy base while his phone incessantly pings with loads of nothingy bollocks from the school WhatsApp group. But perhaps, given a proper shot, he would have excelled at being a father. We’ll never know.

Still, one thing is for sure. Madeleine Swann is a terrible mother. In the film’s closing scene, she starts to tell Mathilde the story of James Bond. But she does it in English, even though Mathilde has only ever spoken in French. I’m not sure what’s worse; telling a story about a promiscuous drunk murderer to a five-year-old, or doing it in a language she doesn’t understand. Either way, that kid is screwed.



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