Before diving into the pulsing metal heart of J-Lo’s new fantastically-styled love story This Is Me… Now I should probably issue a quick disclaimer: even though this is among the most unhinged pieces of film imaginable, I completely understand what on earth possessed her to make it. To be honest, if I happened to have a spare $20 million kicking about, the temptation to make an incredibly extra, metaphor-riddled quasi-musical about my trials and tribulations of the heart would be irresistible.
The problem is that it wouldn’t be a very sensible way to spend it. While proper, full-blown heartbreak hurts in a way that makes you feel like you are officially the only living person in history to ever feel this rotten - ever! - most of us have been there, done that, and got the ill-advised break-up haircut to show for it. Bluntly, I can’t see a cinematic recreation of ‘every single time I got dumped’ making for very interesting viewing for anybody apart from me, or possibly my rightfully concerned ex. And on watching this film, I learned that this is something that continues to hold true for everybody across the board: yes, even if you’re Jennifer Lopez.
That said, the first ten minutes were gripping. After introducing us to the Puerto Rican myth of Alida and Taroo, two star-crossed lovers who are transformed into a hummingbird and a flower, it’s straight off to a dystopian love-factory in which an army of dutiful workers load rose petals into a giant palpating organ (of the heart variety, don’t panic, it’s not that kind of movie). J-Lo causes a minor nuisance by clambering all over the conveyor belts while singing her new album’s opener This Time Around, and all is well, albeit in a weird ‘have I accidentally ingested magic mushrooms for lunch?’ kind of way. It might’ve been wise to leave things here.
But then, disaster strikes! J-Lo is forced to don a welding mask, and swiftly heads inside her own crumbling heart in a desperate bid to try and extinguish the fire blazing within. All of the petals wilt, leaving Lopez to roll around in a muddy puddle like a fallen comrade at Glastonbury. The metal heart beats its juddering last gasp, following a slow-motion motorbike crash lacking in any further context. Just in case this glaringly obvious symbolism went over anybody’s head at any point, we have arrived at our first metaphor for heartbreak.
Somehow, this segment is the most rational part of the entire film, and over the next half an hour we follow J-Lo as she rants at the world’s most unethical therapist, fights with an unpleasant man (a Libra, no less) who appears to be wearing a macrame plant holder as a sort of bondage harness, dances around in some sort of cultish wicker arena, and bursts into an interpretative dance routine at a ‘Love Addicts Anonymous’ meeting. “I believe in soulmates, and signs. And hummingbirds,” she grandly declares. “I believe that love never dies and forever is real.”
Along the way, we’re also treated to Ben Affleck appearing as a right-wing newsreader, a star-studded Zodiac Panel who sit around a big round table in the sky and look down on Lopez’s life (including Keke Palmer, Jane Fonda, Kim Petras, and Post Malone) and a knowing wedding scene in which J-Lo marries three different men. The whole thing is soundtracked by an accompanying album of the same name.
And then it’s off to her childhood home in the Bronx. After a brief row in which her younger self accuses present day Lopez of loving “everybody else but you!!” elder Lopez experiences a kind of ecstatic revelation, and decides to celebrate her newfound independence by... taking public transport. When a bus fails to materialise, J-Lo starts flouncing around in the pissing rain with her see-through brolly, twirling around the lampposts like the star of an am-dram production of Singing in the Rain. And then, just like that her heart is fixed again. Enter, her very own Taroo, in the form of Ben Affleck’s chin. And they all lived happily ever after.
You may well be wondering if This Is Me... Now uses its overly earnest façade as cover for some kind of archly camp masterpiece. Unfortunately, the truth is that it’s not even that much fun.
