| Taxi zum Klo | |
| Director: | Frank Ripploh |
| Music: | Hans Wittstatt |
| Cinematography: | Horst Schier |
| Distributor: | Promovision International (USA) |
| Runtime: | 95 minutes |
| Country: | Germany |
| Language: | German |
Taxi zum Klo (Taxi to the Toilet) is a 1981 film written by, directed by, and starring Frank Ripploh. The film is a dark comedy of manners that explores the life of a Berlin school teacher and the contrasts between his public and private lives. As it contains a number of sexually explicit scenes, the film was not passed uncut by the British Board of Film Classification until 2011,[1] though it was widely shown in club cinemas. Taxi zum Klo was considered groundbreaking for its subject matter and achieved a cult status among audiences of the time.
Shot on location with many characters appearing as themselves, the film documents gay culture in West Berlin in the brief moment post gay liberation and before the onset of AIDS, around 1980. Ripploh has stated that much of the film was autobiographical. The title refers to the public toilet as a place for casual gay sex.[2] [3]
The film, largely episodic in structure, follows the protagonist Frank Ripploh (all characters are named after the respective actors) who works as a primary school teacher, and who also leads a sexually promiscuous life in the gay scene of West Berlin. In a film theatre he meets Bernd, and establishes a long-term relationship with him. However, their relationship is punctuated by conflicts due to their contradictory goals in sexuality and life; Bernd desires to move out of the city into the countryside to live more peacefully, and prefers sexual monogamy, whereas Frank embraces the urban life and its underground, and engages in frequent casual and fetishistic sex.
The Village Voice hailed it as "the first masterpiece about the mainstream of male gay life".[4] Taxi zum Klo tied with Beau-père in winning the 1981 Boston Society of Film Critics Award for best foreign language film.[5]
After a showing of the film at the Naro Expanded Cinema, a revival house in Norfolk, Virginia, police confiscated a print of the film on Oct. 5, 1983. The film's distributor filed a lawsuit and the print was returned. The Naro's operators were charged with a misdemeanor[6] and received a light fine.