Compensation is both a victim and a testament to the patience-testing saving graces of rediscovery. With the help of a majority-women and -student crew, its production started in 1993 but was not officially completed until 1999, the same year it premiered. Early screenings at the Toronto and Sundance Film Festivals received acclaim but did not subsequently kindle more widespread attention or a conventional release. More than 25 years later, it was restored (or “rejuvenated,” as director Zeinabu irene Davis prefers), properly rereleased, and heralded by many — not just audiences and critics but the cultural importance-sanctioning Library of Congress — as one of its decade’s best movies. Outside of its handful of latter-day champions, Davis has credited its in-the-interim word-of-mouth endurance to the education-distribution market, particularly via entities like Women Make Movies, Third World Newsreel, and Cinema Guild. “If those institutions didn’t exist,” she told IndieWire earlier this year, “my films would have been lost, so to speak, because as a filmmaker, I don’t want to have to deal with doing invoices, or whatever college or community group is wanting to show it.”
Compensation’s different cinematic standing in two separate decades echoes the film’s own split narrative. The movie follows two short-lived, Chicago-set love stories. Each couple is played finely by Michelle A. Banks, whose real-life deafness was incorporated into Marc Arthur Chéry’s script early in the film’s molding, and John Earl Jelks. The latent different-worlds tension between people of contrasting abilities is applied to two time periods. In the 1910s, Banks plays a woman with activist gumption (she’s leading the charge to reverse the recent segregation of the school for the deaf in which she was just recently enrolled) and Jelks plays an illiterate blue-collar Mississippi transplant. And in the present, Banks is an aspiring graphic novelist and Jelks is a chipper children’s librarian.
Michelle A. Banks and John Earl Jelks in Compensation. All imagery courtesy of Janus Films.
Both men Jelks plays fall hard, doing without hesitation their due diligence to properly communicate with their new paramour. Chéry is careful not to turn Banks’ characters into rather exoticized objects of desire for men who don’t share her disability. Their interior lives, in each timeline, are made more tangible by Chéry and Davis (who are also a couple in real life) showing the seriousness with which they take scholarship and creativity — and how they use them to express themselves in a wider world largely inconsiderate of deaf people’s experiences — and the relationships they have outside their burgeoning ones with the Jelks-portrayed characters. The latter are correspondingly soft, sensitive, and, in conflicting ways and levels of severity, doomed.
Chéry and Davis additionally ground us in Banks’ perspective by, in the film’s 1910s portion, presenting most of her interactions as they might appear in a silent movie, albeit one anachronistically mic-ing the sounds of a beach’s crashing waves. (Banks, who’d mostly acted on stage before Compensation started shooting, did research to ensure her older-generation character’s signing was accurate to how Black people approached turn-of-the-century ASL.) The silent film’s dawning is gestured at in an indelible early scene in which an incredulous all-Black audience doesn’t quite know how to react to the nascent art form at a nickelodeon. A complementary moment happens later in the movie, when the ’90s iterations of Banks and Jelks are choosing a matinee and it’s decided that The Last Action Hero is the best option. Its promises of gun- and fists-forward action sequences probably entail less subtitle-free dialogue for Banks to decipher.
The black-and-white-shot Compensation undidactically wants, and successfully prompts, the viewer to consider the mundane ways the desires and wants of deaf people are paid little mind in broader culture. The bold formal decision to interweave, into the 1910s timeline, archival photos and intertitles that highlight Chicagoan technological and intellectual growth enrich its evocations of time and place, which the film’s low budget prevents from being extensively represented through costume and production design. They also make you ponder where Banks’ character slots into things and how she orients herself. She looks up to the time’s influential Black thinkers. She feels bad for those traveling upward from the South in pursuit of a better life, knowing the discrimination they faced before will just mutate.
John Earl Jelks and Michelle A. Banks in Compensation.
Compensation’s easy-to-root-for romances don’t work out, not because of Banks’ deafness but era-specific forces beyond her and Jelks’ control. Those developments are where Compensation is less convincing, even if, like everything else, they’re trying to make a larger point more than capitulate to melodrama. Without spoiling too much, you can tell Chéry and Davis are striving to underscore how public health crises disproportionately impact Black people, a sweet romance not a reliable safeguard against the tragedies of out-of-the-blue illness.
Davis was part of a fleet of filmmakers known as the L.A. Rebellion, a group comprising Black UCLA students who studied film between the late ’60s and the twilight of the ’80s. The ethos of Compensation, as well as Davis’ several shorts, embodies some of the movement’s primary aims: to challenge Hollywood’s hegemonic representation, orthodox methods of presentation, and star-minded aversion to populating movies with people who are actually part of the specific communities being depicted. Compensation should have been the first of many Davis-helmed feature-length projects — not the first and last.
Peterson Reviews 