"It's In the Water" A Film Review by Linda Lopez McAlister on "The Women's Show" WMNF-FM 88.5, Tampa, FL September 13, 1997 The 8th Annual Pride Gay and Lesbian Film Festival is coming to Tampa starting this coming Friday, September 19. So this is my only opportunity to tell you about the films that will open the festival on Friday night. The main feature film chosen to kick off the festival is a comedy called "It's In the Water" that will appeal to both gay men and lesbians because there are subplots dealing with both. It's very much of a "feel good" film with a happy ending, though there is a good deal of bigotry and ugliness as the story progresses to its climax. But the good guys win out and the hypocrisy and meanness of the villains exposed. Sophisticated plotting it isn't, but it's still always fun for a gay and gay-friendly audience to see films where they gay characters live happily ever after, isn't it? This independent feature was made by a new filmmaker (new to me, anyway) named Kelli Herd. While it's clearly low budget and uses mostly unknown actors and has a less than polished feel to it, it still hangs together quite well. You don't have to cringe at bad acting or technical flaws, and some of the writing is quite sharp and funny. "It's In the Water" takes place in a small Southern town and revolves around the "ruling class" where the men golf at the country club and are in charge of the local businesses and media and the wives (of course they have wives) belong to the Junior League and spend much of the time on their appearance and having just the right thing to wear to every occasion so as to be the perfect complement to their husbands. I once lived in a small Southern town where my job required me to mix with people just like these, and I must say that, although the film employs some comic exaggeration, it isn't very much exaggerated and I could see some real people I once knew mirrored in these characters. The main plot focuses on Alexandra, a young woman raised in this milieu, who married an appropriate man of her class and followed her mother into "the League" but who, miraculously, is far less rigid and narrow than her peers. When a new President of the League (a doctor's wife from a big city) selects Hope House, a hospice for AIDS patients as the League's volunteer project for the year, many of the members freak out and begin to plot to stop the project. At Hope House for volunteeer orientation, Alex runs into Grace who had been her best friend in high school and who is now a divorced mother of two and a nurse at the facility. Also there is Alex's best friend, a gay man she's known all her life, whose older lover is a patient there. At the local establishment church there is an "ex-gay" support group led by one Brother Daniel who is leading the religious side of the charge to get Hope House closed down. Simultaneously, at the Azalea Ball, the rumor gets started that there's something in the water that makes people gay. This leads, of course, to a great financial boon for the bottled water industry and for the local newspaper that pumps up its circulation with its biased and unsubstantiated reporting of all this. The publisher's closeted gay son Mark, who attends Brother Daniel's group, tries in vain to stop the coverage. When a handsome latin painter comes to the group by mistake one night, soon Mark's closeted days are over. Meanwhile, Grace confides in Alex that the reason her marriage broke up was that she was having an affair with a woman. This sets Alex to thinking and to checking out all the lesbian videos in the local video store (quite a few given the makeup of the town) and before long she and Grace are in one another's arms as well. Needless to say, there are no secrets in a little town like this, so the ramifications of this development surface very rapidly. As I said, everything works out all right, more or less, in the end. Not a great work of cinematic art, but if you're inclined to attend the Pride Festival you could do much worse than showing up on Friday night at the Tampa Theater for the screening of "It's In the Water." Copyright 1997. All rights reserved. Please do not copy or reproduce this review without the written consent of the author: mcaliste@chuma. cas.usf.edu.