amo ergo sum, or, jlo's journey to self-love
THIS IS ME...NOW: A LOVE STORY
I wish I could talk to you as if I were the same person I was before watching This Is Me...Now: A Love Story, but to do so would be as impossible as describing, in any configuration of reason, plot, or clarity, what This Is Me...Now: A Love Story was about.
You all know that in this house we support delusion, but there is a spectrum, and this film breaks it.
Jennifer Lopez's 65-minute oeuvre is both an attack and a delight on the senses. I am so thankful to those of you who joined me for the live chat last night, because to have experienced this alone would have been a tragedy.
It would be presumptuous, even silly, for me to try to summarize, categorize, or explain this extended CGI fever dream, but if I had to choose a collection of words and I was feeling generous, I would perhaps — perhaps — posit that the film (a word!) is about finding love in the most (un)expected places.
This Is Me…Now was Entertainment, yes, but my god — at what cost?
My life's new goal, and also coincidentally my biggest fear, is to find a fraction of The Audacity. The Gall. The Temerity. To release a project like this one. To put my legal name and my fully recognizable face and $20 million from my bank account to produce a movie with no narrative beginning or end, a cinematic ouroboros that boldly defies the very tenets of logic.
If this were any other movie, I would likely warn you against spoilers ahead. However, I can say with near certainty that as there is no plot to speak of, no particular reveal will make any scene, character, or song more expected or understandable by virtue of my telling you about it. Still, if you'd like to go into this experience with no background knowledge whatsoever — a worthy endeavor — please go watch TIMNALS and come back in 65 minutes as you are trying to process the fugue state Lopez has put you under.
I wrote about the trailer for this film (god, I get goosebumps every time I use the word film to describe what I watched last night ... too much and never enough) a few weeks ago, back when I thought I would understand The Artist's (more on this later) intentions after seeing the full feature, but my impressions still stand:
She is clearly operating at a level that my pedestrian mind cannot even fathom. Please be serious — how could I (how could any of us) even begin to criticize this leap into an entirely new dimension? What is creativity if not insanity persevering? No. I am sitting down, I am listening, and I am learning.
From the first musical number — a dream sequence, as we discover five minutes later — Lopez's true gift of subtlety is revealed. Lopez's character (who is identified solely as "The Artist" — a single drop of this shamelessness, that’s all I ask for!!!) works at some sort of women-only flower-forward factory (strangely reminiscent of Buffy's season 3 hell interlude), where modern dancing is required, but wait — there's an emergency! The (and I'm so serious) flowers are dying. The petals fall to the factory floor, grey and lifeless. Immediately afterwards, when The Artist is telling her therapist (Fat Joe, in an inspired casting choice) about this dream, we learn that the dreams started when her heart first broke. The symbolism is almost too fine for the human eye to discern.
Beginning TIMNALS with a fever dream is the best choice the film makes, though, because not even actual fevers have made me feel so disoriented. Just when you think a single thread of a plot might materialize, you are thrown into a musical number so deranged it makes you wonder, respectfully, if Lopez has even seen a movie before, much less a musical. Is this the same woman who gave what should have been an award-winning performance in Hustlers? Is this punishment for the snub? Because merely perceiving this dress felt like a punishment.
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