Taxi zum Klo

‘Do you want to come cruising with me? Good.’ So begins Frank Riploh’s astonishing queer Berlin odyssey, largely unseen since its creation 31 years ago. Growing out of an autobiographical multimedia show created by voraciously experimental Riploh, it follows his self-named character as he juggles work as a teacher, socialising with colleagues and neighbours, his compulsive sexual adventures and a fledgling relationship with a more domestically inclined lover. Can a roast dinner compete with a moustachioed stable boy? It’s largely shot in vivid, naturalistic style, the content ranging from banal to explicit – sometimes, as when our hero marks homework in a gay cottage, both – and sometimes punctured with glimpses of creepy paedophilia information films or Nazi-era porn. Riploh’s compelling character dominates: at once liberated and narcissistic, good-natured and wilful, his complexities suit a film whose strong current of humour belies a serious engagement with the general, perhaps intractable problem of whether our impulses toward intimacy and unaccountability can ever be reconciled.