Jennifer Lopez in This Is Me... Now: A Love Story (2024)
An artist’s creations are always personal, but the extreme degree to which pop stars such as Beyoncé, Taylor Swift, and Jennifer Lopez mine their private lives for their work seems a clear way to harness – for their own purposes – the gossip that bubbles around famous women.
Jennifer Lopez has taken the approach to exciting extremes with her opus: This is Me…Now: A Love Story, a feature film (and accompanying album release) inspired by the artist’s rekindling of her relationship with the actor Ben Affleck. The project sees the Latina star follow in the footsteps of Beyoncé, who broke new ground with her visual album Lemonade (2016).
Financed by Lopez herself, this 65-minute musical and cinematic extravaganza tells the story of the artist’s love life as seen through her eyes – and her psyche. Director Dave Meyers brings the surreal visual style from his most famous music videos into an almost entirely digital universe where fairytales, metaphors, and obsessions from Lopez’s rich imagination come to life. The uncanny CGI world of exaggerated proportions recalls the garish sets created for Britney Spears’s Lucky. His video for Missy Elliott’s Lose Control confidently jumped from one wild set-piece to another, and this snappy, matter-of-fact editing style gives Lopez’s film the same thrilling momentum.
You can’t help but admire Lopez’s endearing go-for-broke approach to the film. With varied references (Singin’ in the Rain (1952), The Way We Were (1973)), an eclectic set of celebrity cameos, and fantastic dance sequences ranging from J-Lo solos to big ensemble numbers, it’s as though the star had aimed to pack as many of her passions into this too-short film as possible. Case in point: we open on a beautiful animation illustrating a popular Puerto Rican fairy tale, before a striking sequence shows the singer riding a motorbike across reflecting salt flats, and a third finds her in a strange, dystopian ‘heart factory’. Rather than fear the clash of tones and styles, the film embraces it, and the bonkers but deliriously imaginative result is nothing less than delightful.
Despite its exuberance, this is impressively well-structured and economical filmmaking. The opening tale of star-crossed lovers nicely sets up the main motif of a film about a woman who believes in signs, magic, astrology, and indeed, love.
Although she does not directly reveal any personal details, Lopez is surprisingly vulnerable about the excesses of her romantic disposition and is unafraid to create comedy out of her past mistakes (and marriages). But she is also serious about her issues, and while some ideas work better than others, her reflective journey feels genuine. Striking a good balance between sincerity and tongue-in-cheek meta comedy, the ambitious experiment is a welcome surprise rather than a self-indulgent folly.
► This is Me…Now: A Love Story is available to stream now on Prime Video.