Interview with Agnieszka Smoczynska Director of Silent Twins

MTR Network Main Feed

"The Silent Twins” follows the harrowing true story of identical twin sisters Jennifer of June Gibbons. The daughters of immigrants who moved to the United Kingdom from Barbados, with their parents, in the early 1960s. After a series of moves related to their father’s work, the family settled in Haverfordwest, Wales in 1974. Labeled the Silent Twins for their repeated refusal to speak or read at school or socially engage with anyone but each other, Jennifer and June fell prey to machinations of a system with little room for the idiosyncratic, especially the foreign born. And after repeated trauma-inducing attempts to force them to speak and conform, by psychologists attached to the school administration, both girls were labeled mentally disturbed. In their late teens, a petty crime spree lands the girls in police custody. In lieu of being sentenced like ordinary mischievous kids, a judge confines the Gibbons girls to Broadmoor Hospital, a high security psychiatric facility indefinitely. “The Silent Twins” attempts to pull the reader into the world of the Gibbons sisters and bring their intensely creative drive into sharper focus and convey their actions as those of misunderstood eccentrics. “If you were telling your story, through me, how would you want it to begin?...” Telling someone else’s story is tricky; especially if the world’s already decided what’s important to know about that person. So deciding to shun the standard method, a biopic, and go the route of an outsider art film inspired by their life-altering experiences, is a bold move. One that for director Agnieszka Smoczynska’s first English language feature film, is wildly successful emotionally and visually but woefully hampered by its script limitations. Smoczynska’s film begins with the elementary age sisters' voices reading the opening credits as though they’re radio disc jockeys. It’s a bright, fanciful introduction awash with color and the girls’ infectious laughter. Only for a knock at the door to abruptly shift everything to a shot of the twins (played with remarkable facility of emotion by Leah Mondesir-Simmonds and Eva-Arianna Baxter) sitting at a bench, facing a wall, with their heads bowed. A side view reveals the duo clenching their hands and one sister shooting a look at the other as though commanding her to remain quiet until their mother leaves the doorway. What follows is a quietly disturbing portrayal of these young girls being ostracized on top of being bullied just for being the only Black children in the community. Mondesir-Simmonds and Eva-Arianna Baxter have an increasingly heartbreaking symmetry that conveys more than any amount of dialogue could ever pull off. The duo imbue their performances with a hefty emotion and disturbing edge that’s riveting to witness. Unfortunately, “The Silent Twins” has a serious order of operations problem. Just as you're fully invested in experiencing all this upheaval and increasingly cruel attempts to force the girls out of their shell, the story shifts to Jennifer and June in their late teens. And this here's when it becomes painfully apparent Screenwriter Andrea Siegel’s script is inadequate, glaringly so. Because this is less a biopic and more a biographical art film based on Marjorie Wallace’s novel by the same name and the diaries and other writings of the twins themselves, the onus is on Seigel to ground every flight of fancy and internal exploration with its external counterpart. We follow the teens journey into creative endeavors, and puberty, but with little wrestling with the events of their childhood in the mix. It dismantles a significant amount of the personality profile being revealed to this point. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that not incorporating those moments from their point of view strengthens the arguments made implicitly and by the end overtly that something is mentally "off" with Jennifer and June. (L to R) Tamara Lawrance stars as Jennifer Gibbons and Letitia Wrigh...