Compensation (1999)

 

This film is a part-talkie.  The most famous part-talkie is probably Chaplin's Modern Times, which was seen as a bit of an anomaly when it came out.  There are very few movies like this, and I've often wondered what it would be like if people had kept making them.  Guy Maddin kind of does it, but his films are so often about nostalgia and the narrativization of the past.  What matters about silent film in Brand Upon the Brain, for instance, is that it's thought to be a thing of the past.  

Compensation alternates between one story that takes place in 1911 and another that takes place in 1993.  The two stories focus on deaf, Black women living in Chicago, Malindy in 1911 and Malaika in 1993, both played by Michelle A. Banks.  They both fall in love with hearing men, Arthur and Nico, but have friends in the deaf community with doubts about whether their romances can succeed.

Scenes in the 1911 story use intertitles more often than scenes in the 1993 story, which generally uses subtitles instead, but both stories also have synchronized sound.  Silent film is referenced in this film because it's old, as in Maddin's films, but that's not the only reason.  It's also to reflect on the absence of synchronized sound, to call attention to sensory pleasures and methods of human communication that operate without sound.  The film also frequently shows us archival photography of Chicago.  The past is not nostalgic or out of reach in this film.  It's something we can learn from because it actually has a lot in common with the present.  

While the social problems the characters face are salient parts of the setting, they aren't the film's main focus.  Rather, it's largely focused on the things that make them happy, especially the art forms and other pleasures the deaf characters practice and enjoy.  Malindy and Malaika's hearing partners learn to appreciate this.  A hearing viewer will experience the same from this film's pairing of silent and sound film techniques.

Malindy and Malaika's romances are threatened by illnesses late in the film.  This part of Malindy's story, especially the ending of the film, is what really made me feel this was the best film I've seen since 2021.  To spoil the ending: Arthur contracts tuberculosis and disappears from Malindy's life after he starts self-isolating.  Malindy doesn't know why he disappeared, and he can't write to her because he doesn't know how to read—Malindy had been teaching him.  She assumes that he disappeared because, as a hearing person, he ultimately could not understand her and proved their relationship impossible.  She swears never to let a hearing person treat her like that again.  The unfairness of Malindy having to experience such bitterness because Arthur was ripped away by disease is crushing.  But on his deathbed, Arthur dictates a letter to a priest taking care of him.  The letter includes the poem "Compensation" by Paul Laurence Dunbar, from which the film takes its name.  The poem says:

Because I had loved so deeply
Because I had loved so long
God in his great compassion
Gave me the gift of song

Because I had loved so vainly
And sung with such faltering breath
The Master in infinite mercy
Offers the boon of death 

Malindy taught him this poem.  Its inclusion, and the letter's eloquent prose, speak to the connection that formed between her and Arthur which she had come to doubt.  His final act is to deliver it to her on the beach where they met.  In a single shot, she approaches him, but he runs away to avoid transmitting the disease to her; she turns back to get the letter, and we see him continue receding into the background.  They have to part ways a second time, but this time their connection persists beyond their physical separation.  This encounter is simple, yet it's one of the cleverest and most effective pieces of screenwriting I've ever seen.  You feel the incredible weight of Arthur's having to go off and die, but an even more incredible weight is lifted at the same time, because now they know an enduring love was possible between them.  The possibility is what survives into Malaika's timeline, what makes the connection between past and present.  It makes it clear why the film uses Dunbar's poem, in which love is felt so strongly that it seems like a divine calling, but for the same reason, seems out of reach.  We doubt if people are durable or good enough to attain it.  

The film derives tension from encounters with other people, not just because they might be untrustworthy, but because we don't want to be lonely.  Malindy and Malaika are keenly aware of how other people might disappoint them.  But again, the film is largely about their sources of pleasure, and how they find new people to develop them with.  And more broadly, it suggests that we can hope for this more over time, though it may take 100 years.  It doesn't get better by itself, but by a combination of people standing up for themselves and a growing, evolving effort of communication.  Regarding this dynamic between the characters, the film's focus on their satisfaction, and the unusual form of this film, all I can say is that there should have been a lot more films like it.