Poto and Cabengo (1980)
Twin Girls Invent Own Language, announced the San Diego Union on July 5, 1977. Inside, a barely more nuanced question: “Do Grace and Virginia Kennedy really talk over life’s complexities in a secret language of their own invention, or is their mysterious speech an almost meaningless babble that only sounds sophisticated to others?” This is the ostensible subject of Jean-Pierre Gorin’s film, which opens with a collage of newspaper clippings—Gibberish Talking Twins Called Possessed By Some.
But the story of Grace and Virginia’s idioglossia was ginned up during a slow news cycle, and their parents, with vague hopes of monetary reward, did little to discourage it. Everybody wants something from Gracie and Ginny, and Gorin—who freely admits to wanting a film—senses early on that the real question isn’t What are they saying? but What will happen to them?
Poverty and creditors hound their parents westward. The father, a failed real estate agent, rehearses a sales pitch with his wife playing a wealthy potential buyer. She asks for a swimming pool and “gourmet kitchen” with barely disguised nostalgia for their future. Tom says all the right stuff, and for a moment they are happy to dream. But for now they’re condemned to their cramped quarters, oppressed by furniture.
Gorin takes the twins to the library, and they run around stripping the shelves like little tornadoes, grabbing at a language that’s both foreign and their own. He pleads with them—Stop, you guys! Wait a minute! Let me film you! It will only last a minute! He didn’t really say that; he added it later to the soundtrack. “If I was going to make this film, I would have to beat the clock,” he says, “before the kids turned English majors.” He contemplates kidnapping them to save them from their fate; even for this hater of cinéma vérité, that seems extreme.
But he doesn’t kidnap them, and by the end of the film, the twins are separated and mainstreamed. There’s Gracie intoning the Pledge of Allegiance and singing My Country, ’Tis of Thee. And there’s Ginny reciting Jack be nimble / Jack be quick / Jack jump over the candlestick. Journalists later revealed—as if humans exist to be scooped—that at thirty, Ginny worked on an assembly line and Gracie mopped floors at McDonald’s.
Gorin originally wanted to call his film Two Spoke Together, an homage to John Ford’s Two Rode Together and a metaphor for the twins “riding their private language into the adult world.” Instead, he settled on Poto and Cabengo, the names the twins used to call each other. Anyway, the adult world, with its languages of education, bureaucracy, politics, and money, defeated their private language. ∎