The Young Karl Marx review intelligent

communist bromance
4/5stars

Marx and Engels meet cute in this intense, fervent film about the early
development of communism from I Am Not Your Negro director Raoul
Peck

Raoul Peck is the Haitian film-maker who has an Oscar nomination this
year with his James Baldwin documentary I Am Not Your Negro. Now he
comes to Berlin with this sinewy and intensely focused,
uncompromisingly cerebral period drama, co-written with Pascal
Bonitzer, about the birth of communism in the mid-19th century. It gives
you a real sense of what radical politics was about: talk. There is talk, talk
and more talk. It should be dull, but it isnt. Somehow the spectacle of
fiercely angry people talking about ideas becomes absorbing and even
gripping.

Despite the title, it is not exactly about the young Karl Marx, more about
Marxs bromance with the young Friedrich Engels. Given the potent
presence of his wife Jenny, they for a microsecond almost threaten to
become the Jules et Jim of the Revolutionary left. Peck saves up his
biggest joke, or coup de cinma, for the very end. After an austere movie
featuring men in top hats and mutton chop whiskers, the closing credits
explode in a boisterous and even euphoric montage of political events in
the 20th century Che, the Berlin Wall, Ronnie and Maggie, Nelson
Mandela, the Occupy movement to the accompaniment of Bob Dylan.
No Stalin or Lenin or gulags or Erich Honecker in the montage, though.

Marx is played by August Diehl: ragged, fierce with indignation and

poverty, addicted to cheap cigars, spoiling for an argument and a fight.
Engels, played by Stefan Konarske, is the rich kid whose father is a mill
owner, with a dandy-ish manner of dress and a romantic mien, like a
young Werther who isnt sorrowful but excited about the forthcoming
victory for the working class.

They meet cute. Marx glowers on being introduced; he remembers the

young Friedrich from an earlier encounter, strutting and entitled, for all
the world as if he had invented the class struggle. The chippy young
bruiser clashes with the arrogant puppy. But the ice breaks: Engels
admires the clarity of Marxs material thinking; Marx is a massive fan of
Engelss groundbreaking study of the English working class. Together,
they inhale the new thinking in the air, ideas for which Pierre Proudhon
(seductively played by Olivier Gourmet) is partly responsible. Expelled by
the French, Marx flees to London with Engels where they are invited to
join the socialist fraternity League of the Just, and lend intellectual and
methodological rigour to their evangelical movement. But the break with
Proudhon emboldens them both, and in slightly entryist style, Engels
finally declares to its stunned annual congress that the League of the Just
is to be reconstituted as the Communist League.

This is a film which sticks to a credo that people arguing about theories
and concepts while also periodically angrily rejecting the notion of mere
abstraction is highly interesting. And Peck and Bonitzer pull off the
considerable trick of making it interesting: aided by very good
performances from Diehl and Konarske, although a real flaw is the films
relative lack of interest in their partners: Jenny, played by Vicky Krieps,
and millworker Mary Burns (Hannah Steele) with whom Engels is in love:
it is a rather perfunctory relationship.

There is a tense moment when Marx and Engels chance across a wealthy
mill owner who is a friend of Engelss plutocratic father: Marx coldly
challenges him with his practice of exploiting child labour and says that
the market force that demands this is not a law of nature, but a matter of
manmade relations of production. The man replies sneeringly that this
phrase sounds like Hebrew to him.

The action of the movie proceeds at a steady, intense rate: a pressure-

cooker tempo, which despite the periodic shouting and yelling, does not
vary much. But you can see Marx visibly ageing from his mid-20s to the
brink of 30, exhausted by the birth of communism and the composition of
his Communist Manifesto. It shouldnt work, but it does, due to the
intelligence of the acting and the stamina and concentration of the writing
and directing.