(3 of 3)
Just as the freedom to bring all of heterosexuality's nasty little secrets out of the closet has robbed our films of romantic tension and symbolic inventiveness, it may be that open, but rather middle-class portrayals of homosexuality will also exact their subtle costs. It is hard to imagine any American in the near future achieving the intensely ironic and utterly riveting self-awareness (and occasional self-disgust) of German Director Frank Ripploh in Taxi Zum Klo. And just as well too, many would argue. Movies, like the rest of society, are just beginning to move beyond the notion that homosexuality is an illness rather than a choice. Some people will never make that leap. Or abandon their understandable concern that gay love affairs, depicted by role-model movie stars, may have a baneful influence on the impressionable young. We are, therefore, a long way from being able to portray the infinite range of other choices within the larger homosexual choice. But within the past decade some kind of beginning has been made. It was time, at last, for American movies to recognize that simple fact, however simplistically they have done so.
—By Richard Schickel. Reported by Martha Smilgis/Los Angeles