The Young Karl Marx

Le jeune Karl Marx, France/Germany/Belgium 2017

Raoul Peck, director of the masterful James Baldwin documentary I Am Not Your Negro has described Baldwin and the revolutionary socialist Karl Marx as “the two feet I stand on... They frame who I am, my way of thinking and the way I analyse society.”  

Peck’s equally striking film about Marx is a handsomely mounted historical drama – and political argument – based largely on the letters exchanged between 1843 and 1850 by Marx (August Diehl) and Friedrich Engels (Stefan Konarske), the disaffected son of a wealthy German textile manufacturer. The film charts their personal lives and the course of their friendship and ideological brotherhood from a first wary meeting until the eve of the drafting of the Communist Manifesto. Reconstructing the conditions of the industrial age that made Europe ripe for their radical programme, it tacitly evokes contemporary parallels. Ably served by a pair of smart, charismatic actors in the lead roles, the densely packed screenplay, co-written with Pascal Bonitzer, reanimates their arguments with fervour, clarity and the colour of their personal histories.