Written and directed by Susanna Nicchiarelli
Miss Marx, an Italian-Belgian production written and directed by actress-filmmaker Susanna Nicchiarelli, concerns itself with the latter part of Eleanor Marx’s life from the death of her famous father, Karl Marx, in March 1883 to her own suicide in March 1898.
Miss Marx
The film covers certain aspects of Eleanor’s political and public activity, but it leans heavily toward an interest in her emotional life.
Miss Marx is strongly colored by the writer/director’s feminist outlook and tends to project that into (and impose it onto) the past.
Nicchiarelli’s work opens in 1883. Eleanor Marx (Romola Garai), known to her family as Tussy, eulogizes her father (“He died in harness, his intellect untouched”) at her parents’ shared grave in London. Eleanor soon meets playwright Edward Aveling (Patrick Kennedy) at a lecture he is delivering on the poet Percy Shelley (she and Aveling will later co-author a pamphlet on the subject,