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| John Earl Jelks and Michelle A. Banks in Compensation |
Cast: Michelle A. Banks, John Earl Jelks, Nirvana Cobb, Kevin L. Davis, Christopher Smith, K. Lynn Stephens. Screenplay: Marc Arthur Chéry. Cinematography: Pierre H.L. Davis Jr. Production design: Katharine Watford Cook. Film editing: Dana Briscoe, Zeinabu Irene Davis. Music: Atiba Y. Jali, Reginald R. Robinson.
Zeinabu Irene Davis's Compensation was partly inspired by a poem with that title by Paul Laurence Dunbar:
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 have loved so vainly,
And sung with such faltering breath,
The Master in infinite mercy
Offers the boon of Death.
The film tells parallel love stories, one set in the beginning of the 20th century and the other at its end, with the same two actors playing both pairs of lovers. Michelle A. Banks plays Malindy Brown in the earlier story, and Malaika Brown in the other. Both young women are deaf, as is the actress -- Marc Arthur Chéry rewrote his screenplay to accommodate that fact when Davis discovered Banks in a play and recognized her rightness for the role. The change added another layer to a film about the changes in Black lives over the course of the century. Malindy falls in love with Arthur Jones (John Earl Jelks), who has just arrived in Chicago from Mississippi -- part of the great migration from the South that changed America in the century. Jelks also plays Nico Jones, who falls for Malaika at the end of the century. The intermingled stories focus on communication problems -- Malindy not only has to teach Arthur sign language but also to read -- and the impact of serious illness on the lovers. Davis beautifully integrates archival footage of life in Chicago, and uses silent movie-style intertitles and captions to tell the story, an illuminating approach to depicting both the transformations and the continuities in the Black experience.
