>I won't quickly forget the scene in Starting Point during which a Japanesse officer (Heo Jang-kang) and his Korean subordinate (Shin Seong-il) relentlessly flog another soldier's ass because the latter refuses to apologize. (For what, I'm not entirely sure.) Later, that same sergeant taunts the sore-assed G.I., daring him to kill with a chokehold then laughingly mocking his feeble efforts. The film gets even more sordid when the commanding officer rapes that same soldier later on in a hideaway cave. If you're looking for "queerness" and "degenerate" being given a false equivalency, Kim Soo-yong's war drama with an extensive fictionalized flashback has it in spades.
The gay subplot, if you can call it that, is bizarre. Who's gay? The attacker? The victim? The witness? The young brother with girlfriend problems who's reading his older sibling's autofiction-in-progress? The alcoholic older brother responsible for writing this twisted tale? I actually wondered whether I was misreading the signals until a series of shots foregrounding uniformed butts was followed by an unbuttoned shirt and some rebuttoned pants. What's the opposite of homosexual subtext? Homosexual domtext? Can a movie be homosexual verstext, too? Based on Starting Point, I'd say, "Very much so in 1969."
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