Film: Taxi zum Klo
Year of production: 1980
UK Release date: 23rd May 2011
Distributor: Peccadillo
Certificate: 18
Running time: 83 mins
Director: Frank Ripploh
Starring: Frank Ripploh, Bernd Broaderup, Orpha Termin, Peter Fahrni, Dieter Godde
Genre: Comedy
Format: DVD
Country of Production: West Germany
Language: German
Review by: Karen Rogerson
Thirty years after its original release, Frank Ripploh’s semi-autobiographical film about the sexual exploits of a gay teacher in Berlin receives a digital restoration and its first UK fully uncut release (and there’s plenty of cut and uncut being released onscreen, too). In the early 1980s, Taxi zum Klo’s explicit scenes gained it notoriety (the title translates as ‘Taxi to the toilet’) but it also received critical and popular acclaim for its groundbreaking and frank depiction of the Berlin gay scene.
The mild-mannered hippie demeanour of Taxi zum Klo’s leading character, Frank, contrasts with his colourful personal life. Describing himself as a “normal, jaded, neurotic, polymorphously perverse” teacher, he is torn between the daytime responsibilities of his work and his night time wanderings of the toilets and bath houses of the city in search of constant novelty and fresh conquests.
A hook up with Bernd, the manager of a gay cinema, appears to be the start of a more serious period in Frank’s life, and his nocturnal adventures give way to a settled domesticity. But while the solemn and earnest Bernd dreams of buying a house in a village and growing vegetables, Frank hates the idea of living such a banal existence in an atmosphere of small town ordinariness.
The conflict between the two reaches a climax – a dramatic climax rather than, for once, any other kind – at the Queen’s Ball, where Frank, flamboyantly dressed as a princess in diaphanous veils and shocking pink make up, flirts outrageously with middle-aged queens and pretty stable lads alike. Frank must decide which of two possible fates are preferable, the loneliness of his old, peripatetic lifestyle or the tedium of clockwork domesticity with Bernd…
Frank Ripploh wrote and directed the film, as well as starring in it, so it’s very much a one man show. Without the tongue-in-cheek humour of his performance, Taxi could easily have ended up pretentious or merely pornographic. Light-hearted and carefree, Frank spends his evenings sitting on a toilet cubicle correcting student papers and peeking through a hole in the wall at men playing with themselves, brazenly hitting on everyone from the man filling his car up with petrol to whichever random stranger happens to be hanging around in a designated pick up spot.
The film’s scenes of unsimulated oral and penetrative sex inevitably meant that it encountered problems with distribution in the ‘80s. Originally only intended for screening in private cinema clubs, it was seized by the US censors and refused an ‘X’ classification by the BBFC unless various scenes were cut, which the distributor was not prepared to do at the time. In 1994, it was released on an 18 certificate, after cutting 1 minute 43 seconds of footage, which showed a golden shower scene and, bizarrely, a clip from a genuine German public information film warning against the dangers of paedophiles and their alluring stamp collections, apparently irresistible to the fresh faced youth of Germany (commenting on the paedophile’s bouffant combover, Frank’s cross dressing friend says “you can tell what they’re like by their hair”…).
The sex in Taxi zum Klo is explicit, but the purpose of the film and, to some extent Frank’s own unconscious desire, is to understand how his sexuality defines him. The sex scenes are shown literally warts and all, but they also show the playfulness of those random encounters, the genuine and sometimes touching understanding between those involved, and the intense eroticism of Frank’s verboten experiences. It’s little wonder that, during a pleasant but insipid evening bowling with his colleagues, Frank is distracted by powerful recollections, flashing up on the screen, of threesomes or whippings.
Shot on a shoestring budget, the film isn’t concerned with fancy cinematography or artistic direction. The production values give it the appearance of what it aims to depict, a man whose life is, in many ways, as ordinary as anyone else’s, whose parents send him pants, socks and towels for Christmas, and whose father has a heart complaint. His double life is lived secretively but matter of factly, without the gloss of romance or glamour.
Plot and storytelling take second place to an episodic structure. Each of Frank’s individual, random encounters represents both the day to day substance of his life, and how he is defined by his restless sexuality and impatience with the mundane and predictable. Underneath his light heartedness, Frank is torn between two fears: of ending up as Mr Average and never shedding that feeling of restless discontent, or of never managing to be faithful and ending up, in his own words, as an old fag hanging out in toilets. The sexual content of the film might mark it as ‘gay interest’, but Frank’s fear of defining himself by his lifestyle choices and ending up as a caricature of himself is likely to touch a chord with wider audiences - if they’re not offended by the sex scenes.
Shot before AIDS became a major public health issue, the freedom of Frank’s lifestyle in Taxi zum Klo inevitably seems to belong to a more innocent era, but it stands the test of time. The explicit scenes may still shock, but the film’s sense of the absurd and ridiculous and its naturalistic performances make it likeable, amusing, and unexpectedly touching. KR
