Jennifer Lopez Stages a Visual Odyssey through Her Relationship History in This Is Me…Now: A Love Story
We begin at the beginning. The very beginning. Back before Gigli. Back before Jenny was even a glimmer in the block’s eye. We begin at the origin of love itself; or at least an origin of love costing a dear thing. Using a Taíno-Puerto Rican legend, Jennifer Lopez’s voiceover introduces her audience to the devastation of love—a burden with which Lopez is well-acquainted. Colorful, mural-like mosaics collapse into each other, illustrating the doomed romance of “Alida and Taroo,” two star-crossed lovers whose fates transform them into a flower and a hummingbird, respectively, forever seeking their estranged mate. Through this mythology, Lopez sets the stage for a semi-serious examination, and eventual celebration, of her own sometimes-hopeless romanticism. It’s no small feat, but within an impressively swift 65 minutes, centuries worth of inherited infatuation are healed by the power of VFX, inner child work, and Jane Fonda.
An accompaniment to her ninth studio album, This Is Me…Now: A Love Story is Jennifer Lopez’s visual odyssey through a relationship history that every tabloid and their grandmother has an opinion on. But, as Lopez’s pre-recorded intro to her sneak peek screening presses, This Is Me…Now is a dual opportunity. This is the chance for Lopez to narrate the trajectory of heartbreak in her own words, visually, aurally and narratively. It’s also a chance for her audience to seek the truth. Thankfully, This Is Me…Now is not overly concerned with realism as much as the spirit of self-actualization. This is J.Lo now, then, and breathing what could be into life on multiple planes of existence. This is J.Lo’s Cloud Atlas and, for that, J.Lo fans everywhere can grab their popcorn and prepare for a dizzying ride.
Helmed by veteran music video director Dave Meyers and co-written by Lopez and Matt Walton, the visual album is, first and foremost, dazzlingly romantic. It is also minorly self-reflexive, gratifyingly excessive, ham-fistedly and lovingly referential, and gleefully riding the pendulum between the nostalgic warmth of a well-designed movie musical and the cool uncanny valley of a contemporary digital sci-fi. Often, the two tones crash into each other at top speed. In her opening number, Lopez is an A-framed factory foreman navigating literalized, alternately Snowpiercer and Armageddon-tinted (but cravenly ugly) heartbreak in the form of a giant mechanical heart-shaped engine fed by increasingly scarce rose petals harvested by an army of women workers. A softer moment plops Lopez into a see-through Sims house where she can longingly recite the lines to The Way We Were alongside Robert Redford and Barbra Streisand; another onto a deserted, rainy street where she hip-hops a tribute to Gene Kelly in eye-strainingly dim lighting.
Music videos and narrative vignettes are strung together by Lopez playing “The Artist,” an exaggerated version of herself talking, dreaming and singing through her problems with her therapist (rapper Fat Joe). With the launchpad of psychoanalysis, Lopez is free to careen through cinematic genres at will, consistently chasing spectacle as she, Fat Joe and her ultra-hip, attractive and equally maladjusted young friends ask what she’s missing in her life. Though it’s obvious to any casual listener of 2002’s This Is Me…Then that at least part of the answer to that soul-searching question will be “Ben Affleck,” much of Lopez’s path to her once-and-future fiancé is chaotic. When beats are predictable, they’re largely successful because they play to Lopez’s strengths as a performer: Extravagant and bonkers showmanship, borderline uncomfortable earnestness, and coy rom-com ditziness and self-deprecation.