Miss Marx

Miss Marx (2020) was written and directed by Susanna Nicchiarelli. It stars Romola Garai as Eleanor Marx and Patrick Kennedy as her lover, Edward Aveling. Both of them are skilled actors, and portray their roles well.

Eleanor Marx (1855 - 1898) was the youngest daughter of Karl Marx and his wife Jenny von Westphalen. She was a fiery socialist and advocate for women's rights and worker's rights.

I wasn't familiar with the life of Eleanor Marx when I saw the movie, but I did some reading about her before I wrote this review. The film appears factually accurate. Of course, all of the dialog is created by writer-collector Nicchiarelli, and there's no way to confirm what was actually said. Even so, it sounded reasonable and realistic to me.

We saw the film virtually from the Washington, D. C. Labor Film Festival. It worked well on the small screen. For reasons I can't understand, the movie has a terrible IMDb rating of 5.6. (OK--it's not a happy movie, but that doesn't mean it's a bad movie.) I thought it was much better than that, and rated it 8.

P. S. For reasons unknown to me, there's punk rock music on the soundtrack. Not a good choice.

I could tell what they were trying to do with this film - what with the heavy and loud music and French filmmaking style, but it just didn't come together for me. Mostly, it was a quiet film, and then all of a sudden the music was hardcore and didn't fit at all. Think Sofia Coppola's Marie Antoinette, but not done well.

I like Romola Garai in everything she's done, and I didn't not like her in this, but it was just weak writing and editing and directing. The storyline was very choppy - I mean, in one scene she was led by a poor young boy to a poverty-stricken mother laying in filth with a newborn by her side, suffering with mastitis - then cut to her doing a love scene from A Doll's House. We don't find out how Eleanor M helped with the family, if at all. We never went back to it. It was a confusing couple of minutes that didn't tell me anything.

I found myself pausing the movie and referring to Wikipedia to fill in the blanks left by this movie. Not a thing you'd normally have to do if a biopic is made well, but something you want to do after it's finished so you can learn more about the subject because the film has instilled that interest.

Watch it, though, for Romola Garai - she's always great.

Jenny Julia Eleanor Marx (16 January 1855 - 31 March 1898), sometimes called Eleanor Aveling and known to her family as Tussy, was the English-born youngest daughter of Karl Marx. She was herself a socialist activist who sometimes worked as a literary translator. In March 1898, after discovering that her partner Edward Aveling had secretly married the previous year, she poisoned herself at the age of 43.

Jenny Laura Marx (26 September 1845 - 25 November 1911) was a socialist activist. The second daughter of Karl Marx and Jenny von Westphalen, she married revolutionary writer Paul Lafargue in 1868. The two committed suicide together in 1911.

That's for context, and Paul Lafargue wrote The Right to be Lazy, with which ppl may like to familiarise them selves so as understand how punk rock their lives were.

Wikki source, According to Lafargue, wage labour is tantamount to slavery, and to fight as a labour movement for the extension of slavery is preposterous. In the book Lafargue proposes the right to be lazy, in contrast to the right to work, which he deems bourgeois.

I thoroughly recommend this film.

Sorry, at the risk of offending people who enjoyed this movie i found it turgid, slow and quite tedious. I'm sure the title character had a very interesting life, hopefully another movie will be made about her and focuses less on trying to be "hip" (a woeful scene near the end captures what I mean by this statement) and more on producing a stronger narrative about the character. Sorry i can only give it 2 stars.

Well, seems quite an interesting costume drama? Not be so sure! The italian director has made this movie original by mixing in very strange music, nothing less than something like punk rock. Nichiarelli kinda says that the free and very very modern spirit of Marx's daughter was kinda imprisoned in the 19th century's dogmas and especially patriarchal society, where women did not have even a half of freedoms as today. So there is tons of femminism in the movie. Oh yes, all femminists have to see it (seriously). I do understand this approach BUT...for me it did not function. On the contrary - it frightened me away. I could not connect with this drama. This rock music just cancelled any connection i would liked to have with the movie. And especially the ending, the finale. OMG. My big compliments, however, go to the production design - very good, of Alessandro Vannucci and Igor Gabriel. Also costume design - Massimo Parrini - 9 points.