Contrary
to his serious-as-heart-attack philosophical and economical
scriptures, Karl Marx, at least in his youth years, was an
interesting person. Being usually the smartest person in the room
didn’t prevent him to be a drunken, irresponsible asshole, which
makes him almost ideal subject of an insightful, informative,
light-weight and fun to watch biopic as is the case with Raoul
Peck’s (Lumumba, last year’s Oscar-nominated
documentary I Am Not Your Negro) The Young Karl Marx
that covers the philosopher's years in Paris, Brussels and London.
“The
atheist, socialist Jew”, as his wife half-seriously calls himself,
Karl Marx (played by August Deihl of Inglorious Basterds,
The Counterfeiters and Allied fame) tries to provide
for his family in bubbling, post-Bonaparte Paris as a writer of
thought-provoking articles in German and French journals. He and his
“fallen” aristocratic wife Jenny von Westphalen (Vicki Kreips
of A Most Wanted Man) are living in relative poverty and their
baby is constantly getting ill. Instead of exploring other career
options, both of them frequent leftist political manifestations,
getting in touch with political figures as anarchists Proudhon
(played like a wise Zen-master by Olivier Gourmet), Bakunin
and Weitling (Alexander Scheer).
There
he also meets (for the second time, which is one of film’s
punchline) young, boyishly good-looking and bourgeois well-behaved
Friedrich Engels (Stefan Konarske), son of wealthy
industrialist and already an author of the famous economical study
The Condition of the Working Class in England. The bromance
starts and the rest is history: the invention of “Scientific
Socialism”, the transformation of The League of the Just into The
League of Communists, and taking over the international workers
movement.
The
film has a considerable educational value. The script written by Peck
and French veteran screenwriter Pascal Bonitzer uses the real
letters two of the minds behind scientific, revolutionary socialism
exchanged throughout the years as the primary source so the audience,
especially the ones who haven’t wrestled with Marxism in
high-school and college years, can see the real people behind the
philosophy, social, economical and political theory. The level of
mutual respect and commitment to the work from the duo is commendable
and the fun they have theoreticising seems great.
Also,
Peck and Bonitzer have a good eye for the details of
the period, not just the visual details, but the complete atmosphere
considering the class system, early form of liberal capitalism not
squeamish towards the child labor and the constant threat of
repression and surveillance. Some would say that nothing much has
changed since, since nowadays capitalism is as brutal as the one from
almost 200 years ago and new revolutions are being debated in caffes
and apartments in vibrant, metropolitan cities.
The
other qualities of the script are its witty dialogues and a strong
level of self-consciousness that transforms into brilliant irony that
pictures socialism either as a blind idealist or as a destructive
fantasy cooked in the minds of upper classes. Having in mind the
historical events following the intellectual adventurism of Marx,
Engels and the rest of the bunch, it is fair to say that the
prominent socialists maybe detested bourgeois sense of morality, but
were first to accept the enemy’s goods and lifestyle as their own.
The love for champaign is inherent, some would say.
The
irony extends even to the meta-level, knowing that the director of
this biopic is Raoul Peck, former Haitian minister of culture,
and a political figure par excellence. It is safe to assume that it
takes to be a “champaign socialist” to know one. Otherwise, his
sense of directing is clear and lucid enough not to get in the way of
an interesting material up until the very end destroyed by on the
nose symbolism of Bob Dylan’s Like a Rolling Stone
and montage of the revolutionary events from the 20th
century. There is no Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot or Honecker (if we want to
stay on the grounds of German socialism), though.
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