After Harry and Meghan and Posh and Becks, Jen and Ben up the ante
All you need is love, and a camera crew.
Never mind name stickers on car windscreens or an ad in The Times, these days the only proof of “we’re official” is an access-all-areas documentary on a streaming platform. Remember Harry looking askance as Meghan performed her medieval curtsy for kicks? And David calling out his wife Victoria “not really that posh” Beckham for driving to school in a Rolls? But with this overload of A-list intimacy on display, we’ve had none so overwhelming, but also strangely sweet, as that of Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck.
Eyebrows must rise at the title alone: The Greatest Love Story Never Told. Really? This is surely among the most documented romances of the 21st century. For anyone otherwise occupied, a quick recap: Oscar-winner Affleck and Latino singing-dancing superstar Lopez fell in love on the set of their 2003 film Gigli, swiftly became “Bennifer” to the watching world, with a dream wedding planned until… 2004 and scratch of record. Gigli had bombed, the nuptials were cancelled (three days before – all those sad flowers!) and both married other people.
Two decades later, the couple’s rekindled flame became one of fans’ great consolations of lockdown, and now Lopez has made a three-part homage to her lost and found again great love.
The first is This Is Me… Now, a new album in which she pours out her feelings, but the second is a decidedly more bonkers affair. Billed an “autobiographical romcom action sci-fi”, the movie musical This Is Me… Now: a Love Story sees Lopez channel her inner Lara Croft in some futuristic dystopia, as she dances, fights through fire and a series of traumatic relationships, three doomed marriages and… Did no one have the nerve to say “no”? Two words: vanity project.
Fortunately, we also get the companion documentary, “the making of” all of the above, a refreshingly unvarnished account of Lopez’s struggles to get funding and A-list names for her film: “Taylor Swift says no.” Lopez in sweatpants, tears streaming down her unmade-up face, is a much more appealing figure than the victim-warrior she’s so keen to bring to the screen. The greatest delight, though, is how clearly the two halves of Bennifer differ in their opinions as to the value of the whole enterprise. “I’ve decided to tell my story that I’ve never shared with anybody in the world,” says J-Lo with a straight face, “because I think it’s beautiful.” For Affleck, whose grumpy red-carpet face has made him the subject of many an internet meme, “Things that are private are sacred and special because, in part, they’re private.”
