Frank Ripploh | Taxi zum Klo (Taxi to the Toilets) / 1981

compulsion

by Douglas Messerli

 

Frank Ripploh (screenwriter and director) Taxi zum Klo (Taxi to the Toilets) / 1981

 

Ripploh’s film is so similar in some respects to Christopher Larkin’s A Very Natural Thing (1974) that it seems almost uncanny. The central figure of Taxi to the Toilets, Frank (Ripploh) like David in Larkin’s film, is by day a schoolteacher. But in this case he is the more promiscuous of the couple, even taking his student’s homework to read with him into his toilet stops waiting for a cock to be shoved into a near-by glory hole. What’s more, as you might expect in a German-made film, Frank is rather strongly into leather and light S&M.

     His domestic partner, who much like David cooks, cleans, and keeps the balcony plants in their apartment, Bernd (Bernd Broaderup) is the manager of a movie theater which shows late-night gay films. Frank met him on one of his many nightly travels throughout Berlin in search of a gay trick. And like the couple in Larkin’s film they enjoy one another in their simple bedroom sex.

     Yet in this film, made only 7 years after A Very Natural Thing, we begin to see ugly diseases on the horizon. Later in the film Frank is hospitalized with hepatitis, told that he will have to remain there for several weeks. Ripploh’s work, however, is more of a comic version of Larkin’s more argumentative piece. So putting on his clothes over his hospital gown, Frank orders up a taxi to take him to various city public toilets to find a pickup; when he finally does discern someone standing outside in the cold of a locked toilet, this would-be sex companion, upon espying Frank’s undergarments, flees the scene.

      Given Bernd’s preference that they move to the country to raise food and perhaps a few animals instead of remaining in the city, Frank does briefly attempt to limit his sexual appetite—but without success. Most nights his lover is left alone, like Larkin’s David, hugging the pillow instead of Frank. One of the most outrageous lines of the film is Frank’s campy statement—once he has laced up into his leather gear and found his prophylactics and cocaine—“Don’t wait up. I’ll be late tonight.”

 

      Another clever moment of this work consists of Frank attempting to tutor at home one of his students not at doing well in the class, while in the other room Bernd and their transgender friend watch a German educational film warning young boys about pervert pedophiles. As Frank attempts to help the boy in arithmetic, the child hands him some of his metal toys, suggesting they play “horsey,” as Frank does everything possible to return his student’s attention to the lesson at hand.

      Despite the film’s jocularity, however, Ripploh’s work points in the opposite direction of Larkin’s optimism. As Frank’s adventures accelerate, for example, he meets up with a gas station attendant whose number he had scribbled down in one of his student’s lesson books earlier in the film. The attendant (Peter Fahrni, also listed as an assistant director, perhaps a relative given that 

my Swiss great-grandfather shared the same name) plays out the humiliating acts of beating Frank across his back before pissing over his entire body.

      More significantly, attending an annual drag ball for which this year Frank dresses somewhat like Scheherazade and Bernd as a sailor, the story-teller missing his midnight departure only to arrive the next morning at his school still in costume, Bernd having left him in anger for all their missed opportunities to live a more regularized life.

      Obviously, Frank has committed a kind of symbolic suicide by now having lost his mode of employment on top of his increasing ill health. Giving up on all sense of order, he hands each of his students a single die (the singular of dice), encouraging her or him to roll for the chance of performing the worst acts she or he might imagine committing, including beating up one another, destroying the classroom, and tearing off one another’s clothing, which the camera catches them accomplishing before cutting, for the film’s last scene, to show Bernd at a nearby petting zoo, holding a lamb in his arms.

     It is doubtful that Bernd will continue to sacrifice his own life to a man who cannot put an end to his sexual escapades; besides, we have already seen Bernd at a travel agent discussing various possible tourist destinations. The sacrificial beast, most likely, is Frank who has somewhere lost his life in his many voyages between the taxi and the toilets.

 

Los Angeles, September 25, 2020

Reprinted from World Cinema Review and My Queer Cinema blog (September 2020).