SORRY, TOM ROBINSON. BOTH “BITTER TEARS’ AND “TAXI ZUM KLO” ARE IN COLOR!
Written, directed by, and starring Frank Ripploh, Taxi zum Klo (“Taxi to the Toilet”) is a groundbreaking semi-autobiographical German film that candidly explores the dual life of a gay man in West Berlin at the dawn of the 1980s.
In the city late tonight
Double feature, black and white(sic)
Bitter Tears and Taxi to the Klo
Find a bar, avoid a fight
Show your papers, be polite
Walking home with nowhere else to go
Tom Robinson “Atmospherics” from the 1984 album “War Baby”
Singer/songwriter Tom Robinson immortalized this movie in his song “Atmospherics: ListentotheRadio” co-written with Peter Gabriel) from his 1984 album “Hope and Glory.” He pairs it with Fassbinder’s “The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant.” Presumably, for rhyming, Gabriel and Robinson say that both movies are in black and white. Sorry, guys, they are both in color.
Written, directed by, and starring Frank Ripploh, Taxi zum Klo (“Taxi to the Toilet”) is a groundbreaking semi-autobiographical German film that candidly explores the dual life of a gay man in West Berlin at the dawn of the 1980s.
Similar in theme and storyline to “Nighthawks” (see above), the protagonist Frank (played by Ripploh) is a dedicated and charismatic schoolteacher by day and an openly gay man by night, navigating the tension between his professional respectability and his uninhibited personal life. In keeping with the ethos of his time and place his nocturnal freedom of expression is highly sexual, as he cruises public toilets, bars, and sex clubs for anonymous sexual encounters and Ripploh, the director, films these scenes with a sense of documentary-like realism.
He begins a relationship with Bernd (Bernd Broderup), a more domestically inclined man who desires monogamy and stability. Frank, however, struggles with fidelity and the constraints of a conventional relationship. The film is both a celebration of queer desire and a critique of the emotional isolation that can accompany sexual liberation. Its sexual candor was shocking at the time.
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