AMAZON | This Is Me . . . Now: A Love Story
Jennifer Lopez rediscovers romance—and herself
MUSICAL Lopez’s visual companion to her new album is essentially a romantic fairy tale redefined in terms of the modern myth of self-validation. She plays a woman, named the Artist, who keeps tripping up in her relationships. Why? Because she’s forgotten to love herself. Once that lesson is unlocked, she’s liberated from her past and ready to find her forever-after soulmate: Although he’s glimpsed only elliptically at the end, Prince Charming has the lightly stubbled cleft chin of Lopez’s handsome husband, Ben Affleck.
Her A-List Guest StarsThey play a zodiacal council that monitors Lopez’s love life
CLOCKWISE FROM TOP: ARI & LOUISE; PRIME(4); KATHERINE BOMBOY/NBC/GETTY IMAGES; SANTIAGO FELIPE/GETTY IMAGES; CRAIG BARRITT/GETTY IMAGES; ANGELA WEISS/AFP/GETTY IMAGES; JASON MENDEZ/GETTY IMAGES; MEDIAPUNCH/SHUTTERSTOCK
The 65 minutes leading up to this denouement, though, is anything but simple (or dull): This Is Me . . . Now is wildly, deliriously ornate, a pull-out-all- the-stops musical that sweeps us through a string of extravagant fantasy numbers, all of them showcasing the album’s infectious songs. We see Lopez sorting rose petals on a conveyor belt in a factory driven by a giant steampunk heart (she said recently that this is a metaphor for her breakup with Affleck 20 years ago); Lopez desperately hurtling herself from one end of a see-through plexiglass apartment to the other while trying to escape an abusive lover; Lopez whirling through a chiffon-light sequence imagining her repeated trips to the altar for three ultimately unsuccessful marriages; finally, Lopez dancing happily through a downpour—it’s an homage to Gene Kelly’s immortal number in Singin’ in the Rain but with much heavier precipitation.
‘Danced with enough athletic energy to stage five or six Super Bowl halftime shows’
Most of these episodes, danced with enough feverish, athletic energy to stage five or six Super Bowl halftime shows, turn out to be dreams that the Artist relates to her therapist (Fat Joe). (Musical aficionados may recognize this as the same dramatic framework used in the 1941 Broadway hit Lady in the Dark.) Meanwhile, somewhere up in the stratosphere, a wisecracking council of zodiac figures, presided over by none other than Jane Fonda, looks down in concern and bemusement. It’s Clash of the Titans meets “Jenny From the Block”—not a sentence anyone probably ever expected to read.
This Is Me . . . Now is Lopez’s valentine to love, to Affleck and— justifiably— to herself. (Launches Feb. 16)