DVD Review: ’Taxi Zum Klo’ - Film Reviews | CineVue
▻http://www.cine-vue.com/2011/03/dvd-releases-taxi-zum-klo_15.html
https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-tubKom0e-7s/Tv8CSm4m5kI/AAAAAAAADe8/0UltfH0u3zQ/s1600/taxi+zum+klo+lo.jpg During one scene from Frank Ripploh’s semi-autobiographical tale of a sex-obsessed, German school teacher Taxi Zum Klo (1980) we witness a man lying on a bed being sprayed in the face with urine. For ten, maybe fifteen seconds, all we are shown is the increasingly soaked and excited gent and a stream of the aforementioned urine being directed by an unknown party.
Although a large percentage of the film-going public would claim to be appalled by the allusion of one man relieving himself on another, I thought it was a brave and interesting scene. Certainly my first experience of seeing a ’golden shower’ on the big screen and being a liberal fellow in an art house cinema I had no problem with the suggestion. Hell, it was only a stream of water or something; it’s not as if Ripploh had furnished us with a wide shot of him with his cock out actually pissing into the guy’s mouth!
When the wide shot of Ripploh with his cock out actually pissing into the guys’s mouth arrived, a strange silence swept across the audience. Nobody walked out, nobody vomited on the person in the neighboring seat and it wasn’t long before the silence was replaced with laughter - though it wasn’t the act itself which we all found amusing, it was the director’s audacity.
Taxi Zum Klo is audacity personified. Upon its release it quickly became notorious for its graphic portrayal of gay sex. Few people have actually seen the film in its entirety, altough a few gay men of a certain age might have seen the sex scenes cobbled together in a private Soho club or on a grainy videotape. Taken out of context those scenes wouldn’t look out of place in a hardcore porn movie, but to dismiss the film as being nothing more than a sexual aid does Frank Ripploh a gross disservice: it’s a funny, provocative and clever piece of film making.
Shot in a documentary style on a shoe string budget, Ripploh is fearless in exposing his life and desires. By day he’s a good primary school teacher who shares a fabulous relationship with this students and by night he’s a sex tourist haunting public toilets in search of cheap thrills. Along the way he meets a man in a cinema and falls in love but his lust, verging on nymphomania, eventually spirals out of control.
Ripploh is unapologetic about his sexual exploits and being as this film was made in a Pre-AIDS Germany we shouldn’t make the mistake of judging his reckless behaviour by modern standards. Plenty of heterosexual folk liberally put it about back then without fear of reprisal and although some may question his morality, in reality it’s nobody’s business what Frank gets up to with his own body.
The film also attempts to dispel certain myths regarding homosexuals and children. At one point a public information film about paedophiles is inter-cut with scenes of Frank tutoring a student. He deliberately provokes the audience and although he does it in a humorous way he is also making a point. Just because you’re gay that doesn’t mean you pray on children and just because you have a broad sexual appetite that doesn’t mean you can’t be good at your day job. There is no conflict unless you, or a disapproving other, creates one.
All in all the film works best as an insight into the normality of gay life. Frank may run around like a sex-crazed Timothy Claypole at times, and the editing is a little on the clunky side, but if you want to be challenged and experience a piece of cinema quite unlike anything you have seen before then ’Taxi Zum Klo’ is essential viewing. As a straight man - who, admittedly, has always shied way from gay cinema, believing that it wasn’t for him - I was pleasantly surprised.
Although I’m not going to rush down to Blockbuster video and order a stack of homoerotic DVDs, I’m glad to report to anyone laboring under the mis-apprehension that watching two men have sex turns you gay that it simply isn’t true...now where’s my copy of Brokeback Mountain?
Lee Cassanell
Taxi Zum Klo, review - Telegraph
▻http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/film/filmreviews/8467365/Taxi-Zum-Klo-review.html
On its first release, Taxi Zum Klo (1980) was seized by US Customs. The film (its title translates as Taxi to the Toilet) was written and directed by Frank Ripploh who also takes the lead role of a schoolteacher who likes sex. He marks student essays while sitting on cottage toilets, picks up garage attendants, tells his homebody boyfriend that he’s going to clubs to pick up strangers.
These adventures, intercut with scenes of vintage porn, are shot naturalistically with (literally) warts-and-all candour and a good deal of droll humour. The film, far from being degenerate filth, is a loving document of pre-Aids Berlin, and a touching comedy about the human desire for and struggle to achieve intimacy.
Taxi Zum Klo Movie Review & Film Summary (1982) | Roger Ebert
▻http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/taxi-zum-klo-1982
“Taxi zum Klo” is an unsparingly honest film, documentary matched with (I assume) docudrama, in which Ripploh reveals himself fearlessly. The revelations that must have taken the most courage are not the ones about his homosexuality, but the ones about his unhappiness, his sense of inadequacy. He appears in this film to be seeking a life of openness, love, beauty and loyalty to a lover — and at the same time he marches on a treadmill of futile promiscuity.
As the film opens, Ripploh is a schoolteacher in West Germany. He seems to be a pretty good teacher, cheerful and frank with his students. After hours, he cruises the gay bars and public meeting places, seeking anonymous sex, often with a sadomasochistic flavor. He’s particularly drawn to gay sleaze, to the bars specializing in the theatrical flaunting of sexual identity, to the places in the big city where sex is mixed with danger.
He meets a young man, Berndt, whom he values more than most of his partners. They become lovers. They move in together, and Ripploh tries to break his pattern of addictive sex and to be faithful to one person. The movies best scenes involve Frank and Berndt trying to work out the ground rules of a relationship.
Meanwhile, Ripploh gets fired from his job (for staying out too late after a drag ball and imprudently turning up in his classroom in drag). He contract hepatitis, is hospitalized, and, in the movie’s saddest scene, leaves the hospital bed in his patient’s gown, and hails a taxi to take him to a rendezvous with an anonymous stranger (hence the title’s English translation, “Taxi to the Toilet”).
How does he feel about his sex life? Judging by the movie, he finds the sex itself an exciting addiction, but fears his promiscuity is training him to see persons as objects. The end of the process is clearly a great, bleak loneliness, and it is against his loneliness that he seeks protection with Berndt.
“Taxi Zum Klo” does not contain much explicit sex, but the sex it does portray is graphic and will probably shock some viewers. Ripploh believes he could not make an honest film of his life without showing us all of it, and his frankness redeems even his most scatological scene.
The triumph of “Taxi zum Klo” is that, in the midst of its portrait of isolation, Frank Ripploh himself emerges as a cheerful, open man, willing to reveal his weakness, willing to hope that things will take a turn for the better. The movie is about a person, not about his sex life. It understands that all of our identities and lifestyles are just hopeful strategies in the search for a sense of belonging, usefulness and love.