With its bonkers visuals, heart-shaped wedding dress, fantasy flourishes and cryptic logline (“From the heart/soul/dreams of Jennifer Lopez”), the first trailer for This Is Me... Now: A Love Story immediately set tongues a-wagging among the J-Lovers and J-curious alike. What the hell, we asked as one, is this thing? Is it a straight narrative fictional film? A music video? A glossy fashion commercial? A Fast & Furious-meets-Step Up pastiche? A response to the visual poetry of Beyoncé’s Lemonade or the epic nostalgia of Taylor Swift’s The Eras Tour? A cinematic riff on Jungian psychoanalysis as espoused in 1959’s The Archetypes And The Collective Unconscious?
The answer, it turns out, is, “All of the above, and also some other things.” It is, in essence, a kind of bizarre visual album, “inspired” by her ninth record of the same name, which celebrates her marriage to Ben Affleck and the success of the Bennifer 2.0 project. (Nothing will quite prepare you for Affleck’s brief cameo.) Lopez, a self-described “hopeless romantic”, plays a very Jennifer Lopez-y character listed in the credits as ‘The Artist’: a woman coming to terms with her “love addiction” and her numerous failed relationships, eventually concluding that she must first love herself. The fairy-tale framing device tying it all together is that she constantly experiences vivid, visually wacky dreams, as recounted to a therapist (played by rapper Fat Joe). As such, it has a kind of a dream logic, which is to say, not much logic at all.
Meyers gives it all a hyperreal sheen, like we are witnessing some soap-opera hallucination, and the frame is rarely static.
The film begins with a swooping animation depicting the Puerto Rican myth of Alida and Taroo. We then cut to Lopez speeding across reflecting salt flats on a motorcycle with a mysterious beau; before switching to a wild Tim Burton-esque ‘Heart Factory’, where giant steel pipes labelled ‘Tear ducts’ leak water, and Lopez is forced to energetically dance her literal own heart back to life. And that’s all in the opening ten minutes.
It is a pretty audacious hour-and-a-bit. Much of the film will have you scratching your head in bafflement. An avowed astrology fan, Lopez has the entire action overseen by a ‘Zodiacal Council’, looking down on her from on high, stuffed with mad cameos including Jane Fonda, Post Malone, Trevor Noah, astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, and Sadhguru, the Indian guru and founder of the Isha Foundation; Modern Family’s Sofia Vergara, as the zodiac sign Cancer, has the immortal line, “Sometimes I chew my own hair!”
Elsewhere, director Dave Meyers leans on his music-video directing background (he is responsible for many of Lopez’s promos, dating back to 2001’s ‘I’m Real’), conceptualising songs from the new album with blunt, on-the-surface visual metaphors; ‘Rebound’, for example, depicts a toxic relationship where the couple is literally tied together with ropes. Like Garth Marenghi, Lopez clearly considers subtext for cowards.
But there’s something quite disarming about how earnest this enterprise is. “I believe in soulmates, and signs, and hummingbirds,” Lopez says at one point, and you don’t dare doubt it. It’s fairly mind-blowing, in fact, how far she is willing to express this full-hearted vision. Meyers gives it all a hyperreal sheen, like we are witnessing some soap-opera hallucination, and the frame is rarely static. Lopez — whose career began as a backing dancer — is impressively athletic; even in understated numbers, like finale ‘Hummingbird’ — in which Lopez channels Gene Kelly, tap dancing down a rainy street accompanied by a CG hummingbird — she works ridiculously hard for it. As, presumably, do the four choreographers credited here.
Self-financed and resolutely, painfully autobiographical, This Is Me... Now: A Love Story has been accused of being a vanity project for Lopez — an accusation which feels meaningless. Of course it is! You would hardly catch her doing some sort of humility project. This is a garish, frequently insane, diamond-encrusted fantasy trip into the mind of a superstar, and we should be grateful to have even limited access.