Any number of directors could have shot Andrea Seigel's poignant screenplay for "The Silent Twins" and produced a poignant movie in the process. Still, it's hard to imagine any of those films looking, sounding, or feeling like the one Agnieszka Smoczyńska made. Based on the desperately sad true story of two intensely connected black twin sisters who were failed by Britain's educational, legal and mental health services in the 1970s and 1980s, this brazen and heartbreaking drama gets the full benefit of the Poles. unique imagination of the filmmaker. Layering one wild formal flourish over another, from macabre stop-motion animation to elaborately choreographed musical fantasies, to channel the inner lives of two young women who communicated only with each other, keeping the rest of the world out of their circle, is a swing for fences that sometimes, almost by design, spin out of control.
Every time that happens, though, a couple of extraordinary performances — you could even call it a tag team performance — from Letitia Wright and Tamara Lawrance take "The Silent Twins" to the cold hard ground. June and Jennifer Gibbons were identical twins; Needless to say, Wright and Lawrance aren't, though the actors' mutually intuitive body language and shared, synchronized verbal code-switching would lead you to believe otherwise, nullifying every other aspect of this UK/Polish co-production that sounds less than completely true. . The heavy billing of "Black Panther" star Wright, in particular, will fuel distributors' interest in a film that will inevitably divide opinion after its Cannes premiere in Un Certain Regard, but should connect with a devoted audience and carrier of Kleenex in arthouse theaters.
The film opens directly into the mutual mindspace of the twins, beautifully played as children by Leah Mondesir-Simmonds and Eva-Arianna Baxter, as they host an imaginary radio show together. Artfully slipping between topics and punchlines, June and Jennifer talk in their heads with the casual, flowing chatter they wish they could bring to the outside world. Cut to reality, as DP Jakub Kijowski's palette changes from floating golds to cool, wet blues, and they speak to each other in strained, strained whispers, and only when they're alone; if there is someone else in the room, he is unable or unwilling to speak at all. Her immigrant parents from Barbados (Nadine Marshall and Treva Etienne) don't know how to explain the silence; they talked happily like babies, her mother says, "and then less and less."
Director: Agnieszka Smoczynska
Writers: Andrea Seigel, Marjorie Wallace
Stars: Letitia Wright, Jodhi May, Michael Smiley
In the small Welsh town of Haverfordwest, June and Jennifer are regularly subjected to racist harassment and abuse on the playground. After transferring to a school for children with learning difficulties, kind therapist Tim Thomas (Michael Smiley) still can't do anything to get the girls out of his psychological bubble; dividing them is also detrimental to his mental health. Cut to early adulthood, and June (Wright) and Jennifer (Lawrance) have effectively been shunned by formal education, but have nonetheless retreated into highly creative isolation: in the small double room where they spend most of the time, they invent elaborate fantastic stories. , performing them with hand-made puppets, or putting them to paper on a single shared typewriter.
Together, they dream of being published authors, an eye-opening way of communicating with others that doesn't require speech, though after a series of pushbacks from publishers, they conclude their writing is too insular and decide to make contact with the outside world. The drive is combined with her desire for Wayne, a cruel and playful former classmate; As they both lose their virginity to him, blossoming fantasies of rosy romantic ecstasy bluntly give way to rough, undernourished sex in a cold garage, it's not the first or last time editor Agnieszka Glinska cuts abruptly and devastatingly between the inside and outside of the cufflinks. outer lives.
Their coming of age has some positive effects: with Wayne, they can finally converse, albeit hesitantly, with a third person, but it unsettles them more drastically. A joint streak of petty criminal activity sees them sentenced to an indefinite term at Britain's notorious Broadmoor Hospital, a harsh, high-security psychiatric facility where the twins' emotional and intellectual development stunts as the months turn into years.
Watch The Silent Twins 2022 Movie Trailer
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