Debut: 'Essex Girls'
“Essex girl” (noun): a stereotype of young women in the United Kingdom, usually blonde and white with excessive tanner and a perceived lack of intelligence.
This image is crucial to understanding the themes of Yero Timi-Biu’s short film, Essex Girls (2023). Despite being named after the white stereotype, Timi-Biu’s film follows a young Black girl, Bisola (Busayo Ige), as she navigates her ever-evolving social circle in school.
From the opening scene in the film, Timi-Biu does a good job showing the contrast between Bisola and her friend group. The first character shown on camera is Saffron (Maisie Smith), one of Bisola’s white friends. Saffron is shown as the almost picturesque “Essex girl,” with overly styled hair and an almost obscene amount of orange tanner on her face. The camera follows Saffron talking and laughing with a boy before panning over to Charlie (Adrianna Bertola), Bisola’s other white friend, also talking and laughing with a boy.
In the same shot, the camera pans over to Bisola, attempting a conversation with a white boy who seems uncomfortable with the conversation despite it being about what Bisola is studying. Already, Timi-Biu shows the audience the racial tension lurking beneath the surface in Bisola’s community. Unlike the other boys who seem to enjoy their conversations with Bisola’s friends, this boy makes no effort to engage in Bisola’s interests, and when Bisola’s friends press her on seeing him again, Bisola uncomfortably says he “doesn’t like girls like her,” which Saffron and Charlie interpret as a self-image problem.
Self-image is a large theme of Essex Girls, specifically self-image as it aligns with a person’s racial identity. In one scene of Bisola getting ready for school, she flat-irons her naturally textured hair in an ugly hiss of smoke to imitate the straight hair of her white friends. In a study of African diaspora, proximity to whiteness is frequently attributed to negative self-image amongst Black people. This is seen throughout Essex Girls whenever Bisola interacts with her white friends. She dances around the topic of her race when they ask her why she didn’t enjoy spending time with the white boy from the opening scene.
The theme of self-image is further seen in the classroom when learning about migration. The teacher, when asking for a definition of the word, is asked by a Black student, Ashlee (Corinna Brown), what the word has to do with geography. Despite raising her hand to ask her question, the teacher labels her comment as a “rude interruption,” and after she refuses to back down, he makes a racist comment about her being in his classroom (primarily white) before sending her out of the room. When Bisola objects to this, he sends her out as well.
The two girls bond over having never met before and Ashlee ends up inviting Bisola to a party in London with her and her friends. Bisola ends up leaving Saffron and Charlie in order to go out with Ashlee and her friends, but Saffron and Charlie, sensing discontent, remind Bisola that she can talk to them about anything, touching on the main theme of self-image once more.
However, Bisola simply cannot talk to them about what she is going through. While she feels out of place in her largely white community, her white friends would not understand that feeling or even why, a key example of this being the previously mentioned moment when Bisola says the boy from earlier “doesn’t like girls like her.” Saffron and Charlie hear the comment as Bisola not feeling pretty, when, as Bisola later clarifies, the boy clearly was not interested in Bisola because of her skin color.
Later, when Bisola goes to the London party, she enters a room full of Black British people. The first boy she runs into there draws a contrast between the white boy from earlier. When Malachi (Daniel Adeosun) hears her name, he accurately guesses her family is from Nigeria, showing an obvious interest in her because of her ethnicity, unlike the boy from earlier. This point is driven even further by Malachi’s comment regarding Nigerian girls being his “weakness,” again drawing sharp contrast to the white boy from earlier who was visibly uncomfortable being paired up with Bisola.
The “Essex girl” image is objectively a negative one. It can be compared to the “dumb blonde” trope found frequently in American media, where the appearance of a white woman who styles or carries herself a certain way is deemed unintelligent and therefore less desirable or worthy of admiration. The “Essex girl” trope is similar, however Essex, a county in England, is not made up of only white women. The short film adopts the title Essex Girls to ask audiences to think of the other women in Essex: the Black women.
The short film examines what it means to grow up Black in a white environment that exists as a white stereotype. Where does a young Black woman fit in and how does she learn to grow and learn to love herself? Timi-Biu doesn’t offer a direct solution to these questions, but after the events of the party, Bisola seems to realize who her friends are and who she wants to be around, reminding the audience that self-image comes from living how one wants to live, not how others want one to live.
