“Miss Marx”: a feminist … and a tortured lover

From a young age, Eleanor Marx believed that the greatest virtue was telling the truth. With this conviction, the youngest daughter of Karl Marx fought her social and feminist battles on an exhausting life path. Hayat was shown at the “Venice Film Festival” in the official competition through the film “Miss Marx” by Italian director Susanna Nicarelli, who said during the press conference: “She is a person who influenced me a lot. A woman first turned to socialism in the 19th century to address the issue of women. The director confirmed that she had obtained a large number of personal documents from Eleanor, such as her letters and notebooks, which are still preserved (most of the conversations are derived from those sources). And she stressed that the greatest challenge was “to communicate with a real figure that appears in those texts very close and modern.” “The 19th century is closer than we think,” said the director, who won the best film award in the “Horizons” section of the festival three years ago for the film “Niko, 1988.”

Eleanor (Romula Garay) was called Tosi and was described as the “bravest” of the three daughters of Karl Marx. She carried her legacy. Her wit and combative nature made her the perfect match to keep her father’s intellectual flame alive. She was the one who fought for workers’ rights, gender equality, equal opportunities in education, work and the ballot box, as well as against child labor. A Shakespearean intellectual and a communist to the bone, she was the first to translate works like “Madame Bovary” into English. Born a feminist, militant and passionate, she chose the wrong man for her life partner. Eleanor has not been very clear and determined in her life. The film walks along a double narrative line: her public life, her intellectual, political and feminist activism, and her relationship with Edward Offling (Patrick Kennedy), who in reality is a deceptive, mysterious, penniless one that she couldn’t get rid of. When he found out that he had secretly married a young actress, the pain was too great to bear, so he committed suicide by poisoning himself at age 43. The film works on many fronts: the fight against the oppression of women by men, for the revolutions and changes required, and also the difficulty of facing the self and the consciousness it reveals. About Eleanor’s reluctance to end a toxic relationship.
Marxist thought has come under much criticism from feminism because it has focused on capitalism in Europe through factory workers, at the expense of social and family problems, such as housework and raising children. sons. But Marx repeatedly referred to the oppression of women by capitalism, and spoke of the inherent slavery of the family and the oppression of women in bourgeois families. For decades, feminism has tried to reconcile Marxist theory with its requirements. Nicarelli’s film tells how the interests of women and the working class can go hand in hand … Eleanor made them.
The film is an embodiment of the struggle between mind and feeling. Eleanor is a girl determined by revolutionary and feminist ideas but emotionally fragile, unable to break free. Her writings are as timeless as all books on liberation struggles, human rights and human rights. This extremism in the conflict is transformed by the Italian director of characters to the cinema, and Garay explodes into presenting the character with punk music that seems out of place for the environment but is completely in tune with the energy that illuminates Eleanor’s troubled soul. The film begins with the death of Karl Marx (Philip Groenig), with a farewell speech received by his daughter, and also begins with his liberation from the enormous weight of her father’s character.
She is firm, Nicarelli, in contrast to Eleanor’s strong, socialist and activist image, shouting at men “Women are no longer slaves of men”, as she portrayed him giving fiery speeches. She is a woman who has been well assimilated by her father’s economic and political outlook, while at the same time being trapped in a disappointing and sad love story. The real struggle of the film is between the progressive and intellectual environment in which Karl Marx was born and raised, and the real difficulties of internal and private human changes that Eleanor embodies. How to make a revolution without a total awareness of the real relationships between people or without a radical change in the reality of persecuted women? In “Miss Marx”, Eleanor will remain stuck on this question.
Despite the robustness and mass production of the film, there is no greater mistake than owning suitable materials and not knowing how to use them, or using them improperly. Eleanor Marx’s life deserves to be explored further, to follow those ideals that motivated her father and made her one of the spokespersons for the socialism under which she was born and raised. A bourgeois woman who fought for the proletarian class, but this doctrine was limited by the film to some speeches that were not enough, but rather disappointed a bit. Although Nicarelli cinema is very powerful and feminist, most of the time it has shown that Eleanor is subordinate to her partner. As if she got rid of the “patriarchal” system represented by her father, and went to a second system that resembles the first one represented in Affling, in addition to portraying her most of the time as a miserable and discreet woman. The director decided to let the dysfunctional love story dominate the second track of the film, that is, the political and social struggles, and this is understandable. It showed the discrepancy between what Eleanor had in mind and his personal life, but it did not show the arguments and ideals for which he had fought. Even the movie got shallow, to the point where it couldn’t create the whirlwind necessary to make viewers believe its thinking. The amount of subordination and the poor focus on her rendered the narrative intentions useless and marginalized what the young woman wanted to do.

The film begins with the death of Karl Marx and a funeral speech delivered by his daughter.

Susanna Nicarelli is a very clear director in what she seeks, tells and visualizes. She is straightforward and no-frills, accurate in camera movement and casting. She showed the true words Eleanor said, directing them to the viewer. We saw the young woman consumed by political and union struggles, we saw her next to the port and gas workers who are not paid enough to lead a healthy family life. We saw her with women who were looking for a place for themselves, respect and appreciation. We have seen her with many, but always alone, or with, or waiting for Edward. The director said: “With the apparent contradiction between the public and private dimensions, the story of Eleanor Marx opens an abyss in the complexity of human responses and the fragility of the delusions and toxicities of some romantic relationships. Eleanor’s life means talking about topics so modern that they are still revolutionary today, more than a century later. At a time when the issue of emancipation has become more central than ever, Eleanor’s story identifies all the difficulties and contradictions: I think it is more appropriate than ever to try to understand some characteristics of the age in which we live ”.
A clear and real statement, but this is what we did not see in the film, which is drowned in the great contradictions of this woman. Imagine her living in two bodies and two souls. There is something wrong with the film, something educational. Nicarelli turned the tape to where he donated, which is smart and accurate. The story was presented with elegance and romance. But as viewers, we wanted to see Eleanor Marx in greater depth and know a lot more about her. There is a pent-up energy to the movie, despite some of the musical bursts we’ve mentioned. The film was limited to the basic features of a character that we would have liked to see in the midst of the proletarian uprisings, and his fierce struggle in the debates and class upheavals that he defended. The film cannot be considered bad, but it is a faded version of a woman that we know more about at the end of the film than at the beginning. A film that needs a stylistic maturity that we do not regret if we say that it is not a truly revolutionary film.

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