The Young Karl Marx

Who would guess that a film about the architects of proletariat revolution in 19th century Europe could be so engrossing, relevant and sexy, especially with dialogue cycles bouncing around in German, French, Russian and English? But that is the achievement of Haitian filmmaker and political activist Raoul Peck's "The Young Karl Marx."

Peck's acclaimed 2016 quasi-documentary "I Am Not Your Negro" was built around text from James Baldwin's final unpublished writings but had just as much agency as a polemical message film about the current rise of racism in America.

Peck and co-writer Pascal Bonitzer's are equally bold in "The Young Karl Marx," even as they transform the staid personages of Marx and Engels into sensual rebels with a cause and gregariously passionate men in their private lives.

However romanticized, this is very condensed and engaging historical drama, and present in every scene is the roiling message about the exploitation of the masses at the hands of the rich and privileged is ever present. The young Marx is a 26-year-old radical writer bearing witness to the inhumanity of poverty, and brutal conditions that workers were subject to at the dawn of the industrial revolution.

Marx is fed up with the cowardice of his colleagues, and when his publishers want him to fall in line when their offices are raided for sedition, he lets himself be hauled away in chains. He escapes to Paris, and we next see him in bed with his wife Jenny. They are equal partners who talk politics and literature and have passionate sex. They are also loving parents of their two young children.

Meanwhile, Engels is at the seeming mercy of his father's stern bidding in his factories in Manchester, England, where the workers are subjected to humiliating treatment and dangerous conditions. An Irish worker, Mary (Hannah Steele), incites a walkout over the inhuman conditions, and she is summarily thrown out on the streets. Engels follows her, and they eventually fall in love.

August Diehl and Stefan Konarske are engagingly believable as the young political firebrands seizing their defining moment in history and ready to go down with the fight. They first spar as intellectual rivals, then immediately confess to admiring each other's writing. Soon they are getting drunk together, play chess, they talk political literature, their love for their wives, and down shots, but are never far from plotting their social justice strategies.

Equally strong supporting performances come from Vicky Krieps ("A Single Thread") as Jenny Marx, and Hannah Steele, who, in brief scenes as the fiery Mary Bruns, teases Engels, saying, "I got you the meeting you wanted. Does the League of the Just mean anything to you?"

They lobby the staid organizations of "brotherhood" that seeks to remedy social inequities, that are all but paralyzed by fractious leadership and ineffective strategies. Marx and Engels lobby them, expecting to be rejected as disruptive, but instead, the pair galvanizes the movement into a newly formed and mobilized workers party.

Kudos to the impeccable art direction depicting the poverty in the industrial slums, contrasted with the by the lush interiors of the political powerbrokers. The location cinematographer Kolja Brandt is masterful and captures stunning period detailing of interiors, machinery, city streets and villages of old-world Europe.

The montage image sequences by Brandt and editor Fr�d�rique Broos even strike as an eloquent homage to Serge Eisenstein's "Potemkin."

Even though the narrative fragments in the last scenes of the film, Peck orchestrates a lot of history, political theory, and character exposition to make this a lucid political and personal drama. Not to mention a deft reminder of how corrupted the ideals of the early Communist movement morphed into monstrous totalitarianism.