‘Girl You Know It’s True’ tells Milli Vanilli’s story, once again
The new biopic about the early-‘90s music scandal would be fresher if there hadn’t just been a documentary about the same thing.
The Milli Vanilli scandal, which blew up in the early 1990s, is natural for a music biopic. The group had a rise-and-fall arc familiar to the genre, although the story was particularly unique in that Milli Vanilli was an elaborate fraud.
It’s finally getting that biopic produced in their homeland of Germany from German director Simon Verhoeven. Titled Girl You Know It’s True, named for the group’s most popular song, the film gets at what was unique about the story, although it has nothing new to say about the scandal. It also comes just a year after a documentary about the same thing, which found a unique angle.
In case you’re not familiar, Milli Vanilli, formed in Germany in 1989, was a pop duo consisting of Rob Pilatus and Fab Morvan (no, their names were not “Milli” and “Vanilli.”) Hired by impresario Frank Farian, had a great look and were talented dancers, but they weren’t great singers. So Farian presented them as the real deal, with Pilatus and Morvan as lip-synching frontmen.
The act succeeded beyond anyone’s wildest dreams, becoming a worldwide sensation and winning a Grammy Award for Best New Artist. It was perhaps inevitable that the fraud couldn’t be sustained, and thanks to a skipping record during a live concert, they were caught, leading to worldwide infamy of the kind that led people to burn their records and even class action lawsuits. None of their comeback attempts succeeded, nor did a separate attempt at a new career by the people who actually sang on the album.
The story has been told quite a lot over the years, including in the first-ever episode of VH1’s “Behind the Music” and, more recently, another documentary called Milli Vanilli, which debuted on Paramount+ last year.
That one took the Framing Britney Spears tack of revisionist history, arguing that maybe we shouldn’t have freaked out so much about that controversy in the past, and maybe the villains weren’t who we thought they were.
Indeed, while it wasn’t great for Rob and Fab to go along with the fraud, they were young and relatively unsophisticated about the music business, and they suffered a lot more as a result than either Farian and label head Clive Davis, both of whom emerged with their careers mostly intact.
The new film follows that narrative, casting Tijan Njie as Pilatus and Elan Ben Ali as Morvan, who both uncannily resemble the real thing. It isn’t shy about pointing out that success sometimes went to their heads, although ultimately, it’s clear they suffered too, especially in a heartbreaking series of scenes in which one of them is taken in by a scammer (I’m not sure whether it’s true.)
The film always follows the music biopic formula, aside from a device in which the two members of the band narrate the film from some unclear plane of existence (Pilatus has been dead since 1998, while Morvan remains alive). It also has access to all of the music, although figuring out those permissions must have been complicated.
This is a decent enough telling of the story, but don’t expect many surprises.