The cost of an idea: "The Young Marx" and "Últilmos días en La Habana"

One of the benefits of watching four or five films a day is that unexpected connections are formed when mixing and matching titles from the Berlinale sections, based on screening times.

In the case of The Young Karl Marx, directed by Raoul Peck, and Últimos días en La Habana, by the Cuban Fernando Pérez, these connections were too obvious to miss: the birth of communism as an ideology that ... (fill in the blanks) the 20^th century; and the impact of these ideas in Cuba for over five decades and still counting. More indirectly, an Argentine first person documentary essay, Cuatreros by Albertina Carri, and Sally Potter’s satire The Party, show the ramifications and appeal of these ideas in the 1970s Argentine left, and in a pre-Brexit academic circle in London.

Cobbling together a variety of European sources for producing the film, Peck also wrote the screenplay together with Pascal Bonitzer, and cast two German actors, August Diehl and Stefan Konarske, fluent in French and English, with all three languages spoken in the film for historical accuracy. The Young Marx covers the first three years of the friendship between Karl Marx, a recent Ph.D. from a German university who wants to change the world with the might of the pen, and Friedrich Engels, the son of a German textile manufacturer in Manchester, UK, a first hand observer of unfettered capitalism.  The climax of this biopic of sorts is the writing of the Communist Manifesto in 1848, treated in this picture as a sacred text.  The film’s angle is to bring Herr Marx down from a marble pedestal. It does so by concentrating on his marriage and family life, as the husband of a German aristocrat and the young father of two girls, throughout a hand-to-mouth life in Paris and Brussels.  Engels’ milieu is a Dickensian England, in the style of BBC productions.  Asked about the inspiration for the screenplay, Peck noted that an important source were the letters exchanged by the friends that allowed for a detailed recreation of their domestic world.  The key ideas are explained without didacticism through conversations and meetings: class struggle, surplus value, means of production, alienation, and the motto “workers of the world unite”. It has a refreshing dramatic impact – Marx and diapers.

It will be interesting to see how the film fares in theaters, DVD and streaming, after its world premiere at the Berlinale.  Its production values will appeal to the consumers of historical dramas and Masterpiece Theater, but I bet it will disappoint those looking for a meaty political film like Peck’s powerful Lumumba  (2000) and his knockout documentary essay I Am Not Your Negro, up for an Oscar in two weeks.  The Young Marx takes the road of melodrama, or as an Italian colleague noted somewhat sarcastically,  “it’s just a feuilleton”.   Other reviews have been harsher.

If The Young Marx romanticizes the birth of these ideas, Últimos días de La Habana shows the cost of the communist ideology on the Cuban population, since the Revolution of 1959.  This cost is the subtext of the cinema of Fernando Pérez, one of the most interesting filmmakers working in Cuba today. I use his 1998 Berlinale entry La vida es silbar, a magical realist portrait of Havana in the decade the Soviet Union collapsed, with good results in my courses on international cinema.  Pérez is back this year in the Berlinale Special section with Últimos días en La Habana, the third of his trilogy on the city. It is a loose follow up to Suite Habana (2002), a documentary-style portrait of a cross section of the Cuban society.

The trilogy is best explained against the context of the Castro era, and its political evolution and fossilization during the past fifty years.  In light of the political stagnation in the two decades since La vida es silbar, the characters and plot of Últimos días retreat from the willfully optimistic vision proposed by the on-camera narrator to the audience, breaking the fourth wall. The allegorical ending suggested where the foundations of the post-Castro Cuba should be rooted, mainly tolerance for other political, cultural and religious ideas, including a healthy respect for dissenters. The film called for Fidel to be a father to all.  In Últimos días, the ending is very similar: a young girl, who has nothing and goes nowhere, again addresses the audience directly, but now with a mix of defiance and despair in her lively monologue about an uncertain future – symbolized by the death by AIDS and the exile of the two protagonists.  In the press conference, Perez kindly answered this very question I asked,  saying that “it’s not that the Cuban situation has worsened, it’s that it has become more complex” (he used e neologism  in Spanish, “complejizada”).  If you put the endings of the two films side by side, the material deterioration is visible (the 1950s cars on the road are emblematic), and the deflation of hope too evident to ignore. Últimos días en La Habana the film proposes friendship and laughter to fight the dampening of dreams and the scarcity of goods.  With a documentary eye, trained in the making of newsreels for the Instituto Cubano de Artes y Ciencias Cinematográficos, Perez captures the current phase of Cuban politics, and what you infer is a question mark. No ending set in Plaza de la Revolución this time.

A last minute addition to these comments is the German dramatic comedy I saw last night: In Times of Fading Light, adapted from a novel, and directed by Matti Geschonneck, that centers on the 90^th birthday celebration of a fervent communist (Bruno Ganz, phenomenal) in 1989, before the collapse of the Berlin Wall. The party is a minutely described microcosm of the tightly-surveilled GDR. The family and functionaries toasting to a forgetful comrade are rocked by the unexpected defection of the only grandson to the West.  The son’s Russian wife, an alcoholic with a quick wit, has the best lines. “What happens when our children - the future – no longer believe in it and leave ?”(It was too dark to write down the exact lines). Different in tone and style to Goodbye, Lenin! (2003) and The Lives of Others (2006) In Times of Fading Light, and as entertaining, this is a political comedy of manners about people with regrets, acknowledged or buried, about how they could have lived. Distributed by Warner Bros. Germany, film deserves to do well in Germany and abroad.  

I come back to the hotel every night walking on Stresemannstrasse, in the city’s Mitte district.  The Berlin Wall used to go through that street.  Now two parallel lines of cobblestones, as shown in the photo I took, remind us where the Mauer stood.  The irony is not lost when you watch these films and think about the cost of the ideas that got this wall built.