Taxi zum Klo ***½ (1980, Frank Ripploh, Bernd Broaderup) – Classic Movie Review 4968

Writer-director Frank Ripploh’s provocative, once-shocking, ground-breaking 1980 German gay film won the Max Ophuls prize for comedy at the Berlin Film Festival and Boston Society of Film Critics Awards voted it the Best Foreign Language Film (shared with Beau Pere, 1981). But it upset some gay groups (who protested) and possibly some non-gay audiences (who didn’t).

The story contrasts a gay man’s differing public and private lives. With much of the film autobiographical, Ripploh himself plays a school teacher, aspiring film-maker Frank, who looks for casual gay sex at night in loos (the ‘klo’ of the title), and his real-life lover Bernd Broaderup plays Bernd, the attentive and caring lover his character mistreats in the movie by his constant cruising in public toilets.

In a confident and challenging debut as film-maker, Ripploh paints a revealing portrait of a particular form of gay life and relationships at a time just pre-AIDS and of course pre-Internet, as well as a telling picture of West Berlin’s nightlife and gay culture at the time. While there are whiffs of misogyny, self-hatred and self-oppression, the film is amusing and affecting, certainly outclassing the similar British gay film Nighthawks (1978).

Also in the cast are Magdalena Montezuma, Tabea Blumenschein, Peter Fahrni, Dieter Gidde, Gitte Lederer and Orpha Termin.

It was advertised as ‘The notorious hit of the New York Film Festival’. There is a high level of sex and nudity in the film and there are a couple of hardcore scenes. Typically, it was banned in Britain on its original release because of its graphic gay sex scenes. It was eventually given an 18 certificate for video in a cut version but it was cleared in 2005 for an 18 certificate uncut re-rating.

Time changes everything.

Ripploh died of cancer on 24 June 2002, aged 52.

To spell it out, Taxi zum Klo  literally means Taxi to the Toilet.

© Derek Winnert 2017 Classic Movie Review 4968

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