Jennifer Lopez, This Is Me… Now: the review

The new movie This Is Me…Now it is a passion project, about passion, which strangely lacks this essential quality. The singer, dancer and actress Jennifer Lopez he made a visual album rather full of dialogue that aims to illustrate his love life (his undaunted faith in true love, despite his missteps) and at the same time present a new series of uninspiring songs. The problem is that Lopez has never been such a thematic and theatrical artist: this is a project better suited to Beyoncé at Lady Gaga of the world. Lopez, at the height of her musical career, was better at making people dance.

Which is no small thing. But Lopez doesn't have the star profile for a wild swing like This Is Me (now streaming on Amazon Prime). If nothing else, she knows how to evaluate well what the public is interested in: the ups and downs of her love life have been widely covered by the tabloids (and not only), in particular the long and all in all sweet saga of her relationship with Ben Affleck. This aspect of This Is Me (a series of song-centric vignettes chronicling Lopez's struggles to make something work) makes sense: She's taking control of a conversation that often doesn't include her, even though it's about her.

But the performance by Lopez, who co-wrote the film, is generic and vague. She plays herself so to speak. The details have been blurred, suppressed, smoothed out. She surrounds herself with a group of young friends who aren't her friends in real life. Lopez leads the film, heavily riddled with digital effects, into a disturbing biographical valley: it is close to reality, but deviates from it by a few crucial degrees, making the whole thing surreal.

The songs, lackluster numbers and boring ballads, don't add any substance. If the lyrics had been more personal, more thoughtful, perhaps they could have supported the far-reaching scope of Lopez's ambition. But This Is Me it's all pomp and little fire. The theme is a tormented one: while the film version of Lopez loves and loses, we see both a physical manifestation of her heart (rendered as a vaguely steampunk industrial place called the Heart Factory, sigh) and anthropomorphized zodiac symbols (played, among others, by Jane Fonda, Jenifer Lewis, Post Malone, Neil deGrasse Tyson And Keke Palmer) who worry about the missteps and apparent insecurity of their favorite subject. It's all a bit too obvious, as is the final homage to Singin' in the Rain, which is intended to be an exhilarating moment of emancipation. More than triumphal, however, it appears banal.

Nevertheless, This Is Me accidentally contains a noteworthy statement. In the dialogues (Lopez in a psychoanalytic session with Fat JoeLopez at a meeting of love addicts, Lopez in front of worried friends) the film reveals something undeniable: on the big screen Jennifer Lopez is an actress fantastic, perhaps not endowed with a huge expressive range, but still magnetic. It's the opposite of the film's purpose (which is meant to be a powerful confirmation of her musical talent), but This Is Me makes it clear that Lopez's true calling is to be an anything but modest movie star. Why did she seem so unconvinced for so long?

I'm among the Lopez fans who repeatedly point out her amazing work in films like Selena, Out of Sight, Away from the nightmare And The Girls of Wall Street – Business Is Business. There music it was a distraction from what could be one formidable film career (the fact that Lopez was denied an Oscar nomination for The Girls of Wall Street It still stings me to this day.) It's not my place to tell anyone what to do with their unique, wild, precious life, so if Lopez wanted to be a pop diva above all else, so be it. But in This Is Me he is absolutely irresistible when he isn't singing. It's like seeing someone clumsily trying to juggle without caring that they're on a unicycle. The unicycle is already impressive enough!

Now that he has churned out this work, I hope Lopez returns to acting and finds some interesting projects. Maybe an elegant thriller directed by some emerging director, or a romantic drama by a capable and shrewd international director. Of course, Lopez has already been burned in the past when she tried to focus on cinematic prestige (The wind of forgiveness, Bordertown) but, as he claims This Is Me, failure is not an excuse to give up. Maybe the hummingbird tapping against the window in This Is Me it's not a metaphor for the eternal search for love, but the suggestion that the consideration Lopez so desperately seeks might come with her next role.