Taxi Zum Klo (Taxi to the Toilet) is a remarkable AIDS-eve film that was scandalous in its day and still runs rings around self-proclaimed "edgy" queer films that bore us to death each year at the annual local gay and lesbian film festival. Smart and efficiently put-together, its lofty status in the history of gay-themed cinema is well-deserved (Wayne Koestenbaum called it one of the greatest gay-themed films ever, said it still blows his mind with its "happy explicitness, its cheerful liberatory politics"), and post-AIDS viewers may view it thorough an especially tortuous "what might have been" filter.

Frank (Frank Ripploh) is a high-school teacher in Berlin. His diligent nine-to-five is rewarded with trips to action johns and porn cinemas, where one night he meets Bernd (Bernd Broaderup), a theatre manager. They share a romantic affair, but Frank's self-described restlessness and ned to cruise gets in the way. Though he seems to enjoy Bernd's plans for a provincial retirement, he also wonders if he'll ever lose the need to hunt the streets after dark, and have enough money after retirement to hire young boy prostitutes.

Ripploh, who had a small role in Querelle and who often went under the professional name of Peggy von Schnottgenberg, acts as he directs: subtly and gradually. There's no melodrama or quick changes of pace here, the whole thing chugs along at a perfectly pitched pace. A notoriously explicit sex scene (you see everything, no less than porn) occurs mid-film and upsets Frank and Bernd's domestic bliss, but this is about the only plot point in the film that seems to upset the film's gloriously steady rhythm.

Ripploh's hairy bum crack plays a major role in proceedings, it's the first object we see in the movie, and he spends most of his home time in a t-shirt only, bending over and doing callisthenics with no undies. A particularly fascinating scene has Frank at the doctor for an anal wart examination, and nothing is left to the imagination with close ups of a speculum being inserted and Frank in stirrups on the surgery gurney. Grabs of ancient black-and-white German gay porn is interspersed throughout.

Frank trades the inertia of his day job for the inertia of endless nocturnal sex cruising - there are perhaps one too many scenes of him driving around nighttime Berlin looking for cock - but what was interesting to me is the polymorphous approach to romance and erotic partnerships. Frank and Bernd don't seem to stake any claim of exclusivity on each other, though, as mentioned, it's Bernd who appears to be the romantic dreamer who wants something a little more than inner-urban casual-sex purgatory.

Nesty Bernd yearns for Frank to quit the acid tabs and clubs, which Frank seems to consider after an eerily portent stay in hospital with STD overload. While Bernd tires to invigorate the affair with a trip to tropical Capri, Frank can do nothing but search out more toilet sex in the chilly Berlin snow. Frank pisses in tricks' mouths, and so on and Brend tends to drift out of the picture in the third act. Broaderup is easy-on-the-eye and especially effective as the gentle lover who tries in vain to steer his partner away from the fast lane, and writer-director-star Ripploh unveils an unprecedently explicit form of private video diary to the world.

The film ends with a genial party scene and everyone seems fairly happy with the free sex atmosphere and nascent and colourful gay scene, but for me, the film worked as a heartbreaking tragedy, as even though all the characters seem to be fairly content and absorbed with free love and adventure, they have no idea of what was about to break everything to pieces over the next twenty-four months.

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