In Berlin lives Frank Ripploh (as himself), a schoolteacher with a double life. By day he's perfectly respectable as he tutors his pupils, but out of working hours he lives a promiscuous gay lifestyle though still feels as if he'd be better off settling down with the right man. This morning he awakens and ventures out of his flat naked to steal the newspaper from his neighbour across the hall, but gets his comeuppance when the front door closes behind him and he's stranded. He has to rouse his neighbour and climb from her balcony to his while nude to get back in to his flat...
Welcome to the wacky world of Frank, a teacher who turned filmmaker to detail what he thought were the genuinely entertaining adventures he had indulged in while living in Cold War Berlin. Not that global politics entered into this as it was mainly about the homosexual man finding his place in nineteen-eighties Europe, and he took the show don't tell route in delineating his issues, which meant some rather extreme scenes, too extreme for the mainstream at any rate as Taxi Zum Klo was banned in Britain for one thanks to its hardcore gay sex sequences which involved many things straight viewers might have heard about but never seen.
Not to mention one or two gay viewers might have heard about but never seen: he was quite the experimenter, was our Frank. With the title meaning Taxi to the Toilet, you could tell there was no room for niceties in Ripploh's films, and he played himself as something of a rogue, taking his pleasure where he found it and in spite of securing a live-in boyfriend in Bernd reluctant to go steady with only one partner. He suffers for that, mainly in the arguments it creates with the increasingly whiny and tetchy Bernd, but also in sexually transmitted diseases. Not, however, the elephant in the room that anybody watching this now would be all too aware of.
That being the spectre of AIDS, as this was made just as the glory days of homosexual promiscuity were about to come to an abrupt halt. If this had been shot a mere five years later, a more sorrowful tone might have been the case rather than the more upbeat and overtly humorous one that Ripploh employed to tell his story here, and there were some very funny moments, most with an anecdotal sense of fun. That said, the whinier Bernd got the thinner on the ground the laughs became, although as if the director was aware this was getting too serious, he did go out on an item of farce when he goes straight from a drag ball to the classroom the following morning.
Despite that, Ripploh was keen to show heterosexuals that he was just an ordinary guy with an out of the ordinary preference for the company of other adult males, and went out of his way to dispel the myth that gay men are also paedophiles with some amusement, but a lesson to impart as well. Not that many straight audiences would have sought Taxi Zum Klo out particularly, as curiosity would be their main reason for watching it, so there was a suspicion Ripploh was preaching to the choir somewhat. More than that, however, was the suspicion that he was one great big narcissist, starring in his own gay porn scenes as if oblivious to those huge spots on his back which wouldn't be much of a turn on to anyone no matter what their persuasion, and hogging the limelight for the whole hour and a half. He was entitled to do so, of course, but if you didn't find Frank as entertaining as he thought he was then you might not enjoy this much. Music by Hans Wittstatt.
