Directed by: Agnieszka Smoczyńska
Starring: Letitia Wright, Tamara Lawrance, Leah Mondesir-Simmonds, Eva-Arianna Baxter
Rating: ★★★☆☆
Feature films made by a Polish crew but with a UK cast are not ordinarily encountered. Agnieszka Smoczyńska did not pass up the chance of bringing on the big screen the real story of Welsh sisters June and Jennifer Gibbons, based on the accounts of British investigative journalist Marjorie Wallace. Smoczyńska’s directorial gamble paid off. The director and producers of The Silent Twins netted a Golden Lion at the Polish Film Festival in Gdynia.
Fuga (Fugue, 2018), her sophomore effort, did not live up the expectations that came from her debut feature Córki dancingu (The Lure, 2015), but this time again Smoczyńska did everything impeccably. Most of all, and undeniably, she surrounded herself with talented people to work on this film. Nearly impossible not to mention Slamdance-award recipient Barbara Rupik who designed the gory and riotous stop-motions sequences scattered in the film. The animated inserts created by the maker of Duszyczka (The Little Soul, 2019), do justice to the fervid imagination of the Gibbons’ sisters that birthed many unpublished stories and poems.
The fact that the cineaste focused on rendering the inner world of delusion-ridden Gibbons sisters, as literature outsiders, added in depth to her film. After their admission to the Broadmoor Hospital, a high security psychiatric facility in England, they both put a halt to creative writing. The screenplay, co-written by Smoczyńska and Andrea Seigel, subsequently shifts its focus to the symbolical and apparently unescapable conjunction between the twins that are capable of fully interacting only with each other. While June is the Siamese twin that is eventually “allowed” to survive, their progressive separation will take a deadly toll on Jennifer,
The Silent Twins is a stylistically lopsided but concise piece of cinema, dominated by nonchalant zoom shots, but only in the first part of the film. On the whole, Smoczyńska’s feature that premiered in Cannes, shows how the Polish director seems to be more at ease with sequins and flamboyant colours rather than with dark tinges. In this regard, it marks a more-than-welcome return to the witty camp of her debut feature. As a “cinematically fresh plastic flower bouquet” The Silent Twins has something to say to every type of audience.
Film Reviewed by Giuseppe Sedia
Published by Kino Mania on November 18, 2022