The debut teaser for This Is Me… is insane, with a heart-shaped wedding dress, fantastical embellishments, and a mysterious tagline that reads, “From the heart/soul/dreams of Jennifer Lopez.” Now: A Love Story quickly caused both J-Lovers and J-Curious people to wag their heads. We all said, “What the hell is this thing?” together. Is it a fiction film with a linear storyline? A video for music? A glitzy fashion advertisement? A parody of Fast & Furious meets Step Up? A reaction to Taylor Swift’s epic nostalgia on The Eras Tour or Beyoncé’s visual poetry on Lemonade? A film parody of The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, from 1959, which promoted Jungian psychoanalysis?
It is, in essence, a kind of odd 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. The answer, it turns out, is, “All of the above, and also some other things.” Affleck’s brief cameo is unprepared for; you won’t believe it.) Lopez, a self-described “hopeless romantic,” plays a Jennifer Lopez-like role in the credits, as a woman coming to terms with her “love addiction” and her many failed relationships before realizing that she needs to love herself first. Her narrative is connected by a fairy-tale framing device: she describes to a therapist (rapper Fat Joe) having vivid, visually bizarre dreams on a regular basis. That is to say, it has very little logic, more like a dream logic.
The frame is rarely still thanks to Meyers’ hyperrealistic effects, which make everything seem as though we are watching a soap opera delusion.
The movie opens with a soaring animation that tells the story of Taroo and Alida, a Puerto Rican folktale. After that, we shift to Lopez riding a motorcycle across reflecting salt flats with an enigmatic beau. Then, we go to a crazy “Heart Factory” a la Tim Burton, where enormous steel pipes called “Tear ducts” drip water, forcing Lopez to vigorously dance her own physical heart back to life. That concludes the first ten minutes.
It’s a fairly daring hour and a half. You’ll be perplexed and scratching your brain for the most of the movie. As an avid follower of astrology, Lopez has a “Zodiacal Council” watching over her from above. The action is packed with bizarre cameos, such as those from Jane Fonda, Post Malone, Trevor Noah, astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, and Sadhguru, the Indian guru and founder of the Isha Foundation. Sofia Vergara from Modern Family plays the sign of Cancer, and she has the catchy line, “Sometimes I chew my own hair!””
In other places, director Dave Meyers draws on his experience directing music videos (he is in charge of numerous Lopez promos, going all the way back to 2001’s “I’m Real”) to conceptualize songs from the new album using direct, obvious visual metaphors. “Rebound,” for instance, shows a toxic relationship in which the couple is literally bound together with ropes. Similar to Garth Marenghi, Lopez is obviously aware that cowards use subtext.
However, there’s something very sincere about this endeavor: Lopez declares at one point, “I believe in soulmates, and signs, and hummingbirds,” and you dare not question it. The extent to which she is willing to communicate this wholehearted vision is actually pretty mind-blowing. The frame is rarely still thanks to Meyers’ hyperrealistic effects, which make everything seem as though we are watching a soap opera delusion. Lopez, whose career started as a backup dancer, is incredibly athletic; even in modest pieces like the show’s climax, “Hummingbird,” when she tap dances around a rainy street with a computer-generated hummingbird, channeling Gene Kelly, she puts forth an absurd amount of effort. Like the four choreographers listed here, I assume.
This Is Me is an independently funded, fiercely, painfully autobiographical film. Presently: There have been accusations that Lopez utilized A Love Story as a vanity endeavor, although these accusations seem baseless. It is, of course! It would be rare to find her engaged in any kind of selfless endeavor. We should be happy to have even restricted access to this gaudy, often absurd, dream journey inside the psyche of a superstar.