This Is Me… Now: A Love Story is not a film. It’s not a clip. Nor is it a documentary or reality show. It has a lot of production value for a short or Tik-Tok. It’s more than an Instagram reel. Whatever it is, Jenniffer Lopez felt she needed music, drama, lots of choreography, and appearances from famous friends to explain to us how she sees Love. Whether she needed to do that is another question…

I’m a fan of J-Lo, as a star, but I don’t like her music and I don’t follow her personal life anymore, so maybe I consider that a post on some social network would be enough for her to summarize what she said in This Is Me… Now: A Love Story. The undefined format project is a (literally) creative journey of beautiful images, but empty and meaningless.

Defined as “a narrative-based cinematic odyssey, steeped in mythological narrative and personal healing”, the nondescript format (I can’t help but repeat words) is visually incredible, it’s a shame that neither the music nor the story supports the boldness.

New album, new love, a new J-Lo

Released together with the album of the same name – This is Me… Now – the singer-actress’s first in 10 years, J-Lo’s proposal is to make us understand her love journey, going through suffering, passions, mistakes, and attempts to get it right. After all, as one of Hollywood’s biggest Latina stars of all time, Jenniffer Lopez has had her personal life closely monitored for decades.

Almost exactly 20 years ago, she and Ben Affleck fell in love and were nicknamed “Benniffer”, causing positive and negative reactions for what was considered at the time, exaggerated exposure of their relationship. Times were different, today they would be considered discreet, and they would be approved and loved, but two decades ago they generated distrust because they shared so much. Maybe that’s why Jenniffer wants to explain the unnecessary to us.

It must be agreed that Jenniffer went through the relentless misogyny of having her personal life explored and criticized for the number of marriages and engagements. Her exes, on the other hand, never had to ‘explain’ a single point.

Today, over 50 years old and married to someone she is clearly in love with, J-Lo didn’t need to justify anything and the effect seems to be the opposite of what she was looking for: forced by the narrative of This Is Me… Now: A Love Story, I end up having to relive everything and get more details than I would like to imagine. It felt too much all the time.

Four on-screen marriages, four off-screen too

J-Lo’s obsession with marriage is even reflected in her film choices: there are at least four that come to mind that revolve around the theme: Marry Me, Shotgun Wedding, Monster In Law, and The Wedding Planner.

Unsurprisingly, she has been married four times and engaged three more times. Some of these relationships may have been rapidly simultaneous. For example, yes, she fell in love with Ben when they worked together and she was still married to her second husband who, in turn, may have been more than friends when she was still engaged to someone else. What does it matter?

The star’s answer is simple: she grew up believing in love, she hit her head many times to find it, and she changed one relationship into another. As she sings, she did it both out of a lack of self-love and her stubborn pursuit of “happily ever after.” The journey was long and hard, but she needed to learn to love herself and her inner child to finally be fulfilled and find what she had always been looking for.

Her relationship with Ben Affleck is somewhat preserved because he is, for her, the definitive one. But all the others are abusive and even scary! After all, at her invitation, we started trying to guess who was who and none of them were good in the film (or undefined format).

Before this detailed and personal work, Jenniffer starred in Marry Me which now seems like a prologue to this elusive format. Filmed in 2022, when she and Ben were married, the romantic film stars J-Lo as a Latin music star – who has been married three times – who finds Prince Charming in an unlikely math teacher (Owen Wilson). Yes, ultimate husband number four.

Who is who in each relationship?

In This Is Me… Now: A Love Story, she opens the special with a long explanation of a Puerto Rican hummingbird legend, which she claims was her biggest influence in her search for love. We then see that her heart is about to break and she has to lead the team to save it, which marks the beginning of the odyssey.

At one point, to the sound of Can’t Get Enough, she goes through three marriages with three husbands (Tony Bellissimo, Derek Hough, and Trevor Jackson), who appear to be her exes: Ojani Noa, Cris Judd, and Marc Anthony. But she has more.

In the most uncomfortable sequence in the entire film, the song Rebound, we see her literally trapped in a physically abusive relationship. As soon as she appears with a boyfriend carrying a gun, which we obviously see as a direct reference to ex-Sean Combs or Casper Smart, the question remains about the other relationship: who was the guy in the glass house? A-Rod?

J-Lo hedged and told Rolling Stone that the glass house sequence was a metaphor for “past traumas” and not about one of her exes in particular. She wasn’t convincing.

She also doesn’t convince us with this personal project worth 20 million dollars. Unnecessarily intimate, and completely predictable, it is visually stunning, but only worth it for curiosity. When it’s over, it’s a relief…

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