Reviewed by Rama Gaind.
Writer/director: Susanna Nicchiarelli, Pivot Pictures.
Eleanor Marx was intuitive, gifted and ardent. Miss Marx is the story of the youngest daughter of Socialist Revolutionary Karl Marx.
We get an insight into the complexity of the human soul from Eleanor’s story, with its incongruity between public and private life. Revealed is the fragility of our illusions and the deadliness of certain romantic relationships.
The role of Eleanor is played by Bafta and Golden Globe-nominated performer Romola Garai (Suffragette, Atonement). It’s the performance by the British actress that makes it enjoyable to watch.
Eleanor was among the first women to link the themes of feminism and socialism, taking part in the workers’ battles and fights for women’s rights and the abolition of child labour in London. In 1883, she meets Edward Aveling (Patrick Kennedy, The Queen’s Gambit) and her life is crushed by their passionate, but tragic love story.
The domestic reality of Victorian life among the socialists, is what’s captured well.
Described as a punkesque/period biopic, Miss Marx is a 2020 Venice Film Festival Award-winning film.
Eleanor was one of her father’s closest confidants. She became his secretary at 16, and liked to play in her father’s office while he wrote Das Kapital. A year later, she fell in love with Prosper-Olivier Lissagaray, 35, a journalist who was exiled from France for his participation in the Paris Commune. Even though her family initially disapproved of the match, she and her father helped Lissagaray write History of the Paris Commune of 1871. Eleanor ended her relationship in 1882, with her father dying a year later.
Award-winning Italian director Susanna Nicchiarelli (Cosmonaut, Discovery at Dawn, Nico) tells the story with a contemporary receptivity that’s commendable.
Known for her unconventional filmmaking style, Susanna created the film as a timely reminder of the inevitable difficulties and contradictions that are extremely relevant to many aspects of our times today.
Susanna says: “Since I am deeply convinced of the modernity of this story, I tried to keep a distance from the traditional period film style. My idea was to confront the genre of the period film by working on its clichés to overturn them. I wanted to avoid the tone of the positive, uplifting emancipation tale, deconstructing instead the profound contradictions of this narrative”.
- Miss Marx was released in Australian cinemas nationally to coincide with International Women’s Day on 8 March 2022
