"Ruby in Paradise"
                        A film review by
                      Linda Lopez McAlister
                      on "The Women's Show"
                    WMNF-FM (88.5), Tampa, FL
                        January 22, 1994

   Floridians sometimes ironically refer to their state as
"paradise," an example is the South Florida humorist who
published a book a few years ago called "Just Another Boring Day
in Paradise."  Floridian filmmaker Victor Nunez is engaging in
this ironic practice in the title he selected for his new film
"Ruby in Paradise," which opened in Pinellas Park this week and
will come to the Tampa Theater very shortly.

   The stretch of Florida that Ruby (Ashley Judd) inhabits--the
tawdry and forlorn empty beach towns of the Florida Panhandle's
"Redneck Riviera" in the off season--hardly seems like the
promised land. But it is the place that Ruby heads for, perhaps
because of her memory of a happy vacation there as a child, when
she makes the decision after her mother dies to leave her
demanding boyfriend back in Tennessee and strike out on her own.

   A few weeks ago I reviewed a film, "The Ballad of Little Jo,"
about a young woman struggling to survive on her own a hundred
years ago in the west.  "Ruby in Paradise" is, in some ways, the
up-dated counterpart to that story--a young woman of today,
struggling to survive on her own and to find out who she is and
what she wants in life.   She arrives in Panama City Beach with
little money, a battered old car, and not much else, just as the
place is closing up after the summer season.  With difficulty she
finds work as a sales clerk in Chambers Beach Emporium, a place
that sells kitchy souvenirs, beach apparel, and suntan lotion.

   Once she settles in in a mobile home where about the only
decorations she can afford are a paper chinese lantern and a
plant, the first thing she buys is a notebook in which to keep a
journal--"Nothing fancy here," she writes in the first entry, just
a place to write down as honestly as she can, what she's feeling,
thinking, experiencing, in the hope of finding out why she does
the things she does and to get clear about what she wants her
life to be.

   It's not as hard for her in the 1990s to support herself and
live alone as it would have been a century ago.  But it certainly
is not easy, either.  She makes some friends, especially Rochelle
(Alison Dean), a young African-American woman who works in the
store, too, and goes to the local college.  She gets involved
with a couple of men, Ricky (Bentley Mitchum) and Mike (Todd
Field).  She struggles with questions of morality and what you
base it on if you no longer buy into religion.  She goes through
bad times and better times, sometimes veering badly off course,
sometimes being very clear and strong in her quest to find her
own way.

   Nunez, as a filmmaker, is amazingly adept at portraying women
characters insightfully and with respect.  This was amply
apparent in his earlier film based on Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings'
short story "Gal Young 'Un."   In "Ruby" the entire film is from
the point of view of Ruby, this quietly intelligent, young, high
school educated, working class woman.  The care with which her
relationships with other women--Rochelle, Mildred, her neighbor,
the women who work in the laundry--are portrayed is something
women in the audience will appreciate.  For once we get a film in
which a woman's friendships are just as interesting to the
filmmakers as her relationships with men.  In the intimacy of the
writing and the ebbing and flowing rhythms of the film, Nunez
shows that he cares enough about his character to let her life
unfold slowly and without undue drama--as lives usually do (not
that there aren't crises).

   None of the old Hollywood cliches about what is needed for
this film to have a "happy ending" is in evidence here; no
meeting "Mr. Right" and then living happily ever after.  There is
an element of closure to the film's narrative, but it emerges
from the film's cyclical structure that brings us back near the
end of the film to two shots that mirror an earlier sequence in
which a young Indian woman working as a chambermaid at a beach
motel sings a lovely and haunting song outside Ruby's window. The
second time they become friends.  As for how Ruby's life will go
on--that's open ended, as lives are--but by the end of the film
we feel we know her well enough, because we've been there as she
gets to know herself, to think that she might just be able to
turn this rather ordinary place into the place for a life
that's right for her.  And maybe that's all we should expect
paradise to be, anyway.

   I think Women's Show listners will like this film.

   For the WMNF Women's Show this has been Linda Lopez McAlister
on Women and Film.

   Copyright 1993 by Linda Lopez McAlister.  All rights reserved.
Please do not reprint this review without the permission of the
author.