At some point in the documentary Skin, Bobrisky, the bête noire of a certain segment of the internet community, appears.
She talks about herself and himself—by that I mean she speaks about who she is now and who he was. (I know that’s a thicket of pronouns to wade through, but this is the way we live now.)
“The transformation is intact,” she says, smiling, but toward the end of the interview she changes her mind and says she would like to go back to who she used to be.
Now this is a scene that could be overcooked until it’s maudlin, you know, to elicit from the viewer pity for God’s creature who’s lost the way—but Bobrisky is too bubbly, too bright, too queenly, too full of herself to allow that happen, so instead you watch and go your way. She mines her predicament for comedy when she discloses the trouble with the transformation: “The stress I use in rubbing my cream every day is terrible.” At Freedom Park, where Skin showed as part of the iRep Documentary Festival, the audience mostly laughed during his segment.
The Bobrisky interview is one of the bits Skin’s producer and chief interviewer, Beverly Naya, judges her subject impressively. She isn’t so successful with other interviews, which are intended to show the audience the effects of colourism on people, and perhaps the society generally.
This misjudgement is most obvious in a scene where Naya visits the Lagos Mainland and one of her stops is a brothel. With the aid of a Yoruba translator, she quizzes a prostitute, who sheds some tears as the questions go on. Bless Beverly, she looks like she really is interested in this lady’s regimen and reasons. Why does she bleach her skin? she asks almost incredulously.
It should come as no surprise that the answer is that her lover likes her with fairer skin. It doesn’t quite end there; Naya has more questions, including the well-meaning but ultimately silly one: What if this man leaves her? At this point, I wished the lady offered a retort: What if he doesn’t? Would you think I have made a good choice? But, of course, she doesn’t say that. She cries. And those tears are supposed to show us just how much she realizes altering the color of her skin is from the devil. But, question: Is it really that simple?
To my mind, those tears may be the result of getting questions about your life choices thrown at you by a beautiful, young, and successful woman—all things the lady in the brothel can’t be due to a trick of birth. And this is the first of two problems with Skin. Beverly Naya and her director, Daniel Effiong, cannot see that having a woman attractive enough to be typecast as a Nollywood-bombshell speak to one from a different social and aesthetic class on the topic of beauty introduces an avoidable imbalance into the mix.
This is Naya’s major blind spot: not realizing that there is a subtle influencing of the results going on just by being the documentary’s chief interrogator. The lady in the brothel, who is only appearing onscreen because her time is paid for, takes one look at Naya and sees what might have been possible with a little luck on her side, so those tears passed off as a bleaching sew worker’s remorse are really the product of a complex play of the politics of class and beauty standards. This is what Skin is supposed to investigate, but the filmmakers have not allowed what they have found on the field to influence and maybe change their preconceived ideas about colorism. They have not allowed themselves think deep about the elitist basis of colorism, maybe because that would expose their own privilege. Naya’s own experience, which she relays early in the film, is rooted in racism because of her time in the UK. She doesn’t see that a woman in a Lagos brothel doesn’t have that experience, and so the situation needs a different set of social tools to think through her beauty choices. But, I guess, if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
Another note about the elitist problems of Skin: The filmmakers have the elite interviewees in what looks like a studio for a fashion shoot, but then show the non-elites in the dilapidated spaces where they work. Even the lighting in these latter scenarios is harsh. The more elite interviewees also seem to get less rigorous questioning.
One highbrow vendor of lightening creams admits she wouldn’t want her child to use what she sells, and Naya doesn’t really query this response as much as she does the romantic choices the Mainland women have made. Makes you think: The filmmakers might claim the documentary is for the public good, but how much good is in the underlying message that the profit motive trumps everything else in a corruption-ridden society?
Skin’s second problem is structural and connected, perhaps, to a common problem with actors: vanity. As the film progresses, a broad canvas becomes smaller, as what in the film’s first half had been an examination of colorism turns inward and is transformed into an exploration of Naya’s ancestry. We leave Lagos to Naya’s family home in Delta state, and, instantly, there is a considerable loss of cohesiveness. We are told about the Biafra War and how Naya’s matriarchs survived, which is certainly serious—but how does this connect to the film’s first half? I couldn’t have been alone in thinking that the reasons later proffered by the filmmakers at iRep were tenuous.
So: the first problem is one of depth; the second is one of breadth. And yet Skin isn’t a total failure—it is, after all, the first of such work from both Naya and Effiong, a pair known for getting in front of the camera not behind it. They deserve some praise for how well they shoot brown, black, and mulatto faces, even if the interview sessions are cut with cloying shots of the more fashionable interviewees doing God-knows-what. But maybe they’d think better about their own politics next time.
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