In a Shelf Life first, while watching Taxi zum Klo, I recognized a location that also appeared in last month’s pick Christiane F. Appropriately enough, given the thread of squalor that runs through this month’s picks (most of them, anyway—more on that in a bit), it was a public toilet. Both films take place in Berlin in the early ’80s, and both burrow into the city’s underbelly with enthusiasm. Compared with teen junkie Christiane, gay schoolteacher Frank (Frank Ripploh, who also directs) lives a positively bourgeois lifestyle—during the day, anyway. At night, he just can’t stop himself from cruising the toilets.
Both movies are unblinking, however, which here means unsimulated sex acts and a frank look at a real rectal exam that gives new meaning to the phrase “warts and all.” Its honest, self-effacing story and documentary-like realism make Tazi zum Klo a queer cinema favorite on : Filmcrithulk calls it one of the “most important movies of my life… soulful, beautiful and so, so, damn funny,” while friend of the column Liz Purchell quips that it’s “the evergreen gay storyline: two men get into a relationship, but one can’t deal with the other’s cruisey compulsions.”
Several members find solace in the universality of Ripploh’s film. Julius writes, “In watching a [45]-year-old movie about homosexuality, I realized just how old some of the struggles within gay culture are,” calling it a “neo-realistic movie about life with all the embarrassing, dirty and selfish parts left in.” For his part, Ripploh said that this semi-autobiographical work was “neither a pornographic film, nor a sociological exposé, nor a moral lesson,” just life in its uncut form.
