Thomas Piketty is associated with mind-numbing data analysis. Yet in normal times the best-selling French economist is also a cinema lover, often going twice a week. “It’s one of the good things of being in Paris. You just walk and there are movie theatres everywhere,” the 49-year old says. His Capital in the Twenty-First Century was once cruelly labelled the most unread bestseller of all time — on the basis that ebook readers tended to highlight only passages towards the beginning of the text.
Yet those who have read it will know it is laced with literary references, from Jane Austen to Honoré de Balzac.
And so the idea of transforming Piketty’s 577-page economic opus into a 100-minute documentary is less outlandish than it might seem. Here is the story of the accumulation of capital throughout the centuries, with the graphs replaced by clips from Les Misérables, Wall Street and Family Guy.