I knew the name Denys Arcand as a famous Canadian director. I remember the title JESUS OF MONTREAL as a movie that was advertised when I was a teenager, and later THE BARBARIAN INVASIONS won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film. I have not seen or really paid attention to these, but I did perk up a little when some of his early films were released on blu-ray by Canadian International Pictures, a Vinegar-Syndrome-affiliated label “devoted to resurrecting vital, distinctive, and overlooked triumphs of Canadian and Québécois cinema.” And I remembered that when Miguel Hombre recommended them (and Arcand in general) in a discussion of Canadian cinema in the comments to my COSMOPOLIS / MAPS TO THE STARS double feature review. Thank you Miguel.

CIP says their releases range “from arthouse to Canuxploitation,” and what makes GINA interesting is how it’s kind of both. By the end it’s fair to say it’s a rape-revenge movie, but before that it’s a socially conscious drama about labor, class and sexism. The titular Gina (Celine Lomez, THE SILENT PARTNER) is a stripper hired to dance at a cabaret in a small town. But much of the movie follows a group of nameless documentarians staying at the same hotel-motel while in town to interview workers at a textile factory that’s about to have massive layoffs. So there’s alot of screen time spent on just characters (and real people I think?) talking about strikes and unions and how workers are exploited and mistreated.

It’s kind of a funny trick to play on us sickos. It does open with the film crew, but then it goes right into being a scummy crime movie. Gina is introduced in a bathrobe eating cereal while her bosses assault another dancer who left the motel gig early. She breaks it up and comforts the poor lady, but doesn’t seemed too shook up about it. This is her life. The credits play over her riding the train to Louiseville, kinda like GET CARTER, with rockin guitars playing over SHAFT-inspired drums. You start a movie with that kind of swagger, nobody expects they’re taking their vitamins.

Yeah, the town is called Louiseville, and I did think they were talking about Kentucky for a second. Obviously Canada is a foreign country to me, but I was surprised how exotic this movie felt. Is it mainly that they speak French? Or is it more the snow? Louiseville is a small snowy town, but not what we would call redneck. There’s a seedy hotel bar with a strip show next to a frozen river that people ice skate on. And there’s what they refer to as a “Ski-Doo Club,” a group of (mostly) dudes who ride snowmobiles together, and though they don’t wear vests or leather jackets they function the same as a biker gang in movies like BORN LOSERS – going around together to intimidate and sexually harass, ruin the vibe in bars, and much worse.

One of the best touches is that the leader of the club, Bob (Claude Blanchard), is on the same train into town as her, so we know in his normal life he wears a suit and tie, and overhear that he has government connections and has negotiated $85,000 in local development funds for “Ski-Doo trails” two years in a row. Otherwise we know him as a rampaging thug who sleeps in an abandoned boat “clubhouse” with his snowmobile gang. This shows us that at other times he’s considered a respectable member of society.

Gina carries herself as a star. She comes into town wearing a giant white fur hat and demands a better room. The film crew’s version of that is trying to order Negronis when there’s not a full bar and they have to settle for Molson’s. These are long haired cigarette smoking dudes with a rebellious attitude toward the film commissioner who might shut their project down. They’re not as sleazy as the snowmobile guys but they do, for example, invite Gina to their table for obvious reasons, ask her about husbands and boyfriends, always smiling suggestively. It shows how she has to manage the amount of unsolicited male attention she wants to humor at any given time. Later she’s not in the mood for it.

Rita (Paule Baillargeon, I’VE HEARD THE MERMAIDS SINGING), who runs the hotel with her unappreciative husband Marcel (Jean-Pierre Saulnier, NIGHT ZOO), seems to like a compliment she receives when she changes into a short skirt and glittery blouse. It’s not one of those situations where a hotness makeover actually makes a character look less cool, but it’s funny if her regular short hair/thick glasses/pointy-collar-under-sweater look is supposed to make her mousy because by modern standards she looks pretty hip. (In both styles she looks uncannily like Tina Fey.)

The crew gets harassed by the snowmobilers (who think they should be interviewed for TV), the cops (who ask about permits) and the management at the factory (who they trick by sending one guy wearing a tie, speaking English and making them feel like they’ll be central to the movie). Gina actually helps them out, acting as translator when they talk to the Colombians who work the night shift at the factory. It’s the rare scene where translation involves thinking about the words and considering how to summarize it instead of pretending like it’s a cypher that corresponds exactly to English words and syntax.

The crew brings one of their interview subjects, Dolorés (Frédérique Collin, EVIL WORDS), to drink at the cabaret, and one of them lectures Gina about all the work that goes into making her blouse, “sewn in a sweatshop, maybe even by Dolorés.”

“Our stuff’s not that nice,” Dolorés says innocently. Later there’s some tension when Dolorés finds out how much more money Gina makes than her. Not that she gets mad, but she’s obviously thinking about what is required for a woman to be paid well.

Gina earns the wrath of Bob and his weasely right hand man (Jocelyn Bérubé, THE HANDYMAN) by destroying them at pool after they assumed she wasn’t even worthy of playing with them, and later by running off after Bob pressures her into dancing with him and starts grabbing her ass. It’s halfway through the movie when she finally puts on her strip show, dancing to the same song from the opening credits, conveniently on the jukebox. I like that Arcand makes us identify with her as a person well before showing her in her profession as a sex object. Even better, he cuts from the dance to a few uninterrupted minutes of Dolorés’ interview, potentially disrupting boners while pointing to parallels between their jobs. “When you get home after work, you feel so tired, so worn out, you don’t feel like jumping around and dancing… When you work, you gotta think of something else. If you think about the job, you won’t last a week. You’ll go crazy.”

By no fault of Gina’s, there’s no applause when she’s done. She just awkwardly picks up her clothes and walks off the stage, and everybody looks kind of sad.

Bob buys her a drink, a fight breaks out over nothing, she goes to bed. When GINA switches to terror mode it’s really scary – she hears something outside, flips the blinds open and they’re all just standing there outside the window in their parkas, helmets and ski masks. The assault scene is not I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE graphic at all but I mean, you get what’s happening, so it’s very upsetting. She says it was 15 people. The gang has two female members. One participates, the other leans against the door chewing gum and watching.

The next day Gina is still at the hotel. The documentarians don’t understand why she won’t sit with them at breakfast. She just wants to be left alone. They exchange some looks of surprise and amusement after they see the menacing dudes who show up to meet Gina.

Earlier they joked that the one guy looked like a pimp when he put on his suit. Nope, this is what a pimp looks like. Their boss is not a pimp, he’s actually very nice, he shows up in town right after the criminals, wanting to be there in person to give them the bad news that the factory found out what they were doing and got the commissioner to put their film on hold. They start a mission to get their negatives while Gina and those guys from out of town start theirs to get the rapists.

A nice human touch you don’t usually get in a full-on exploitation movie is the series of sad, awkward goodbyes between the various people who were attracted to each other during their brief time in town. They wanted something more but didn’t or couldn’t go there, and now the fantasy of that possibility is ending. The one part where the film crew really goes into outlaw territory is when a security guard tells one of them he’s on private property while he’s marinating in the goodbye he just said to his married crush Dolorés. He bounces that old man off a fence and then tosses him into a mud puddle!

When the pimp is asking for the names of the ski-doo gang, Marcel doesn’t want to narc out his regular customers, but Rita blurts out where to find them. Good for her, but on the other hand she argues against going after them. “Don’t make trouble, it never changes anything,” she says, though that philosophy doesn’t seem to have served her well. I wonder if she changes her mind after she hears what happens to these guys? I guess that depends on how peaceful Louiseville becomes without them.

The last ten minutes or so give patient drive-in viewers a worthy pay off – the thrill of Gina’s friends storming into the tight quarters of the boat and bashing those fuckers with baseball bats and chains, then an excellent night time snowmobile chase with a little bit of MAD MAX part 1 energy to it. The out-of-towners definitely do make trouble, and Gina does not wince when she personally drives right over the weasel guy’s leg.

We do not see the aftermath. It seem for a second like the police are arriving, but it turns out to be some corny cop movie the film crew have moved on to. The Man wouldn’t let them do their factory worker doc, just some bullshit, from the looks of it. Arcand found a way to do both. And this is so much more meaningful when you read that he made an actual documentary on this subject called COTTON MILL, TREADMILL in 1970, that was accused of promoting class conflict and Marxism, forced to be edited and still blocked from release until the year after GINA. He came up in the National Film Board, but still figured out some of the same things as the Americans who came up under Roger Corman. You have my attention, Canada.