The Young Karl Marx

The Young Karl Marx by Raoul Peck is as exciting as a dull seminar.

“The Young Karl Marx” (Le jeune Karl Marx) directed by Raoul Peck was shown at the Berlinale in the Berlinale Special section. The film chronicles the period when young Karl Marx meets his future long-term friend and co-author Friedrich Engels and the several following years. During the press conference Raoul Peck was asked if he read Karl Marx. He answered that he attended seminars dedicated to Marx’s Capital. His film is reminiscent of such a seminar; interminable and tedious.

There are many dialogues, questions, answers however it completely lacks artistic vision. There is no interesting music, camerawork or a gripping plot. The choice of actors is also questionable; the wife of Karl Marx was a baroness and an intellectual but the actress does not have a noble air or good looks and reminds more of a peasant. On the other hand the actress who plays Mary, Friedrich Engel’s partner Mary from the working class, is beautiful and refined. Karl Marx himself in the film is not very impressive and Engels neither.

In 1980 there was made another film called “Karl Marx. The Young Years”, which showed the same period of the great thinker’s life. The film featured exquisite cinematography by the Tarkovsky cinematographer Vadim Yusov and had a wonderful cast. Peck probably wanted to give his own interpretation of the life of Marx. The Soviet-East German co-production was more romantic while Raoul Peck tried to underline the more materialistic side of his relationship with Jenny, showing their sex life and the birth of his child. To deprive Marx of certain romanticism is also not fair, the young philosopher was a romantic of his own kind; he was engaged for seven years to Jenny and dedicated many poems to her.

The discussions depicted in the film are too primitive for such great thinkers such as Marx, Engels, Proudhon and Bakunin. The proletariat, on the other hand, is shown as a group of people with abject faces and feeble children, which makes the ideas of Marx about the proletariat too idealistic and not connected to reality.

One of the positive sides of the picture is that Peck did not try to distort facts about the people in the film. 2018 will be the 200th anniversary of Karl Marx’s birth; it is an important date and the picture will likely be of interest to people not familiar with the story. However after the film finishes one feels relieved that the drawn-out seminar on Karl Marx is finally over.