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The Young Karl Marx: a film by Raoul Peck
Review by Lloyd I. Sederer, MD
What are the images you might conjure up if asked to think about The Communist Manifesto? Of the Soviet, Chinese and other communist revolutions? Of the propagation of a social theory exploited by dictatorships, while not exactly liberating the proletariat?
Writing and shooting a film about Communism meant for Westerners, especially Americans, can’t exactly be easy. I mean, there is a considerable amount of contemporary animus for Communism, its origins notwithstanding. Hmm, why not try to take on the beginnings of Fascism or Feudal Europe or, maybe even The Czars? I mean, we are not exactly talking about Buddhism or The Dalai Lama. But - by the way, as it turns out, the Marx/Engels movement was about achieving equality, and overcoming the inequities of class. Not about state-owned industry or the shackles on civil rights and freedom that have emerged in communist societies in the 20th C.
The Young Karl Marx, is a film by Raoul Peck, a Haitian born director now living in Paris. He recently gave us the brilliant documentary I Am Not Your Negro (about James Baldwin and the racial and class struggle he embodied and gave eloquence to). Mr. Peck’s new Indie release from The Orchard is about Karl Marx, and of course his compatriot Freidrich Engels. The film opens in 1843, early in the dawn of the industrial revolution. It is carefully drawn from the notebooks and correspondence of both men, and their intellectual allies, and well before Das Kapital (1867), the most frequently cited social science text published before 1950. The film concludes when Marx is in his early 30’s.
Heroes, as Marx and Engels became in their time and in history, are mirrors on the societies from which they are bred. Marx was a poor, contentious, Jewish, German atheist genius. He is played with gravitas by August Diehl, born in Berlin and an accomplished stage and screen actor, known to the English-speaking world for his role as an SS officer in Inglourious Basterds. The young Karl is married to Jenny, a somber force played by Vicky Krieps (who stars against Daniel Day Lewis in Phantom Thread), who foregoes her aristocratic family to have the life of struggling intellectuals. Engels is a fair haired, Christian, idealistic, rich son of a German industrialist. He is given to studying the lives of the very factory workers and slum dwellers in Britain that his family employed. Freidrich is passionately rendered by Stefan Konarske, born in northern Germany but schooled in Paris, and known as an actor in both countries. He finds his class opposite in Mary Bruns, an Irish, rebellious worker whom he marries (a self-possessed Hannah Steele). This strong, emotive ensemble delivers the goods that make this story of the work of two Teutonic philosophers burst from its potentially dreary, ideational roots.
The film has its share of police brutality; the menacing and exploitation of workers (including children); grimy streets, pubs and prostitutes; and rousing revolutionary speeches. The chemistry between Marx and Engels, a bromance of ideas and mission, energizes what might otherwise be the monotony of ‘critiques of critiques’, Hegelian debates, and the philosophy of the French anarchist Proudhon (a bemused Olivier Gourmet). The plot and the film is enlivened, as well, by the central roles of Jenny and Mary, not just as domestic rocks, but as leaders in their own rights: modern women in an era of misogyny and discrimination (not that we have escaped that today). For lovers of language, the Continent and the UK, we are taken through Germany, France, Britain and Belgium, in three languages (with subtitles); the French by German actors is beautifully and enviably spoken.
The film ends with a photo and video montage of 20th C. events that mark the stubborn perpetuity of class and race oppression and injustice, set to Bob Dylan’s Like A Rolling Stone. While there was no need to remind us that what Marx and Engels sought to achieve remains an ongoing battle, the film’s finale lets us not forget.
Go to this film if you want enjoy an artistically portrayed, finely acted, character driven, origins story. You will be taken into an era of class struggle, protest and finally revolution. We have here a reminder about the kind of powerful ideas we continue to need in order to balance the often-opposing ideals of freedom and equity. What we need today is to protect our societies from the unbridled capitalism and racism that we encounter daily in the news media.
