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The camera pans across a wall studded with queer-kitsch icons, the self-described "normal, jaded, neurotic, polymorphously perverse teacher" (Frank Ripploh) extends his invitation: "Come cruise with me?" Berlin at the dawn of the 80s is a Babylon of roving desire, to the randy rascal every encounter shudders with carnal potential. (An evocative gag finds a gas-station hunk checking the oil from behind his car and leaving an imprint of his palm on the wet hood.) During the day the protagonist lectures a classroom of munchkins, at night he dons leather cap and romps through an encyclopedia of gay whoopee, from public park gropes to lavatory gloryholes to dungeon spankings. He admires women but has no use for the female sex ("I can't cope with it... it's such a labyrinth"), at the doctor's office he strikes up a casually obscene chat with a chubby sex worker and clears the prudes out of the waiting room. Becoming "the old fag who hangs in bogs" is the big fear, yet a distaste for commitment keeps him savoring golden showers with strangers while his boyfriend (Bernd Broaderup) sulks at home over the cold roast dinner. The filmmaking is rough-hewn, exultantly candid and unafraid of bodies and orifices, in other words just right for this tart, intimate pre-AIDS document, a prankish confessional that suggests Thomas Mann's Felix Krull cutting loose at a bathhouse. Aldrich's The Killing of Sister George is affably woven into the couple's break-up at a transvestite ball, which leaves Broaderup forlorn in his naval stripes while Ripploh heads to school still in odalisque veils, crystallizing the film's balance of narcissism and self-critique. With Peter Fahrni, Orpha Termin, Dieter Gödde, and Klaus Schnee.
--- Fernando F. Croce |