film Home > Movie Reviews

Lots of indie filmmakers can make a movie cheaply. Few have made a low-budget movie as brilliant as Compensation. With its sprawling tale of fated love between two African-American couples in turn-of-the-century and modern-day Chicago, each consisting of one deaf and one hearing partner and both dealing with maladies endemic to their times, Compensation would be considered ambitious at any price.

The film's director, Zeinabu irene Davis, is still negotiating a theatrical deal for it, and is therefore unwilling to reveal her movie's cost. (One clue: It was nominated for this year's Independent Spirit Award in the category of Best First Feature Under $500,000.) On topics other than the budget, though, the filmmaker and University of California at San Diego communications professor is refreshingly up-front.

"I'm an African-American woman," Davis says. "I make films about women of African descent. If someone else wants to do it -- a white male -- that's OK too. But you still have to claim authority over your images."

Davis spent seven years shepherding her film -- shot in alternately luminous and gritty black and white reminiscent of the work of master cinematographer Russell Metty (Touch of Evil) -- from initial idea to finished print. As in many a grand obsession, the film's catalyzing event was a pleasant fluke; while teaching at Antioch College in Ohio, Davis read t he poem "Compensation" by the 19th-century writer Paul Laurence Dunbar. The poem, like the film, deals with love, loss, and transcendence. "The poem is on a plaque outside his home in Dayton," the filmmaker says. It's such a simple poem, but had lots of resonance for me."

The film was not conceived as a vehicle for deaf performers until the director saw actress Michelle A. Banks strut her stuff in a St. Paul, Minn. production of Waiting for Godot. "I was just blown away by her abilities and talents," Davis says. Banks was cast as the woman in both couples (opposed John Earl Jelks, who plays both men), and Marc Arthur Chery's script was revised to make her characters deaf (as well as several others -- Davis cast other deaf actors, and hired deaf technicians for the crew).

Along with changing the plot, the addition of deaf characters changed Compensation in numerous ways both technical and thematic. Malaika, Banks' modern-day character, gained a sister who was not in the original script; their interplay gives the audience visual entré into the characters' otherwise silent mental and emotional processes. Davis says it also altered her camera technique: "The cinematographer and I had to totally understand that we could not go in for tight close-ups, because if you do, you lose their hands, and therefore their means of communication."

With so much of the action taking place silently, Compensation's cumulative power comes from Davis' obsessive layering of images and ideas. One example is her use of intertitles and subtitles (for, respectively, the film's early-1900s and present-day sequences) as a way to address the limitations of spoken language while simultaneously honoring contemporary African filmmaking techniques, which emphasize visuals over dialogue. "Because of the way the colonial powers carved up the [African] continent, you can have as many as 17 different languages spoken in one country," Davis says. "You can't translate a film into 17 languages! So they try to tell stories as visually as possible."

In addition, the director's evocation of African-American characters who cannot hear -- in a world where nobody would much listen to them anyway -- adds a layer of irony that effectively protests racism without shouting in the viewer's face. "I feel that it's my responsibility as a filmmaker to portray images of people who we don't normally get to see through mass media," Davis says. "Most of us don't have very much exposure to a black middle class at the turn of the century. They may not have been the biggest communities, but they were there."

Of course, what we do see a lot of, in both mainstream and indie films, are portrayals of black women as, in Davis' words, "bitches 'n' hos." The filmmaker believes this type of stereotyping is not limited to "just black women. It's roles of just women in general." And exceptions are rare; she points to 1996's Gulf War drama Courage Under Fire, which starred Denzel Washington and Meg Ryan. "An amazing movie!" Davis says, adding with a laugh, "It actually made me believe Meg Ryan could act, you know?"

Mention of that film's dismal box-office performance elicits a sigh from the director. "I'm not going to say people -- black people too -- don't go to see movies with bitches and hos," she says. "But in general, I don't think the powers that be in Hollywood give people the opportunity to experience other kinds of images. And that's where the problem lies."

Compensation's efforts to present another kind of cinematic story have earned some rewards already. The film played at this past winter's Sundance Film Festival, where it was nominated for the Grand Jury Prize. Although the notice at Sundance helped the film secure a deal with Hollywood Video for home-cassette distribution, getting a theatrical- distribution deal has been an ongoing struggle for Davis. "Distributors don't understand how to market the film," she says. "It's so different. You can't apply a single marketing formula."

That lack of marketing makes fest showings, such as this week's two screenings at the Maryland Film Festival, all the more essential, the director says: "The more opportunities we have to show distributors that our box-office was good during the festival, the more write-ups we can get, the better it is to [convince distributors to] take the film on."

Despite Compensation being ostensibly "about" deaf African-Americans, co-star Banks believes that its themes of "compassion, love, communication, and spirit" transcend the film's particulars. Davis sees it as "being like the tearjerkers of the '40s."

"People like to go to a movie to have a good cry. Happily ever after is fine, but everything doesn't have to be happily ever after!" she says. "And hopefully that's how Compensation will come in. You can have different experiences from one film."