We need more Milli Vanillis. Their whole debacle made pop music more fun, more entertaining. And that strikes me as one of the points of pop music in the first place. For those who don’t know, Milli Vanilli was a Black German musical duo who skyrocketed to fame in the late 1980s. They arguably looked posed to become one of the next great music acts until their lipsyncing charade unraveled before the globe’s eyes: Fab Morvan and Rob Pilatus never sang any of Milli Vanilli’s songs. They, like the stars of half of all Bollywood dance numbers, were pretty faces that moved and swayed to someone else’s song. The stellar premise is also why, if the movie industry must continue with the old game of musician biopics, they should make more films like Girl You Know It’s True. It’s just not like the other ones, and sometimes creativity is all it takes to make a good movie.
Elan Ben Ali plays Fabrice Morvan, and by the looks of the actor, it was the role God fastened him to play. I’m shocked they aren’t related in real life. He is fantastic in the part too, as is Tijan Njie as fellow lipsyncing performer Rob Pilatus. For the first hour or so, the two “singers” are as interchangeable as the women in their lives, and only begin to develop their own opinions and idiosyncrasies in the latter half. It’s also in the latter half where the film slags, almost as if Simon Verhoeven, the German-Austrian director with no relation to the famous Paul Verhoeven (though he is related to another Paul Verhoeven who makes movies), didn’t know what to do after the will-they-won’t-they drama caves in. Just like Milli Vanilli, Girl You Know It’s True fizzles into a distant footnote in the zeitgeist.
As a whole, Girl You Know It’s True stands on the outside looking in on its genre. It’s tragic, like many of these kinds of films, but for mostly different reasons, even if, unfortunately, Rob still meets his end by the demon of drugs. It’s about a European group that I’d wager has zero cache with people who did not live through their saga in real-time — a joke the film’s self-conscious pseudo-documentary interludes gest at very quickly. The big elephant in the room, the headlines around Milli Vanilli, gives them something that the boring rockstar clichés starve for: newness. The two leads’ lack of musical talent sits backstage like a bomb waiting to go off. The formal structuring of pseudo-documentary interviews with Rob, Fab, and the infamous Boney M. producer Frank Farian (Matthias Schweighöfer), for better and for worse, mirror the originality of the biography, as does some of the marvelous editing.
These two Black men in late 20th century Europe lived a different life than most of the other music biopic subjects, and that plays into the most infamous parts of their story. The glamorization of their faces and the sexualization of their bodies exotified Black men in a predominantly white culture. The voices behind them are still Black, but their audience wasn’t. In the film, eyes follow them like aliens making first contact in the city square, and their racial differentness never subsides. Verhoeven and his crew traverse the racial elements confidently and with poise instead of tip-toeing around it as many worse movies do. The same could be said about the silliness of the whole story in the first place. Girl You Know It’s True embraces the absurdity of its premise. In an amazing in-world news transition, we hear a broadcaster state, “We interrupt our Iraq War coverage for an update on the Milli Vanilli scandal.” The juxtaposition of gravity in those two noun phrases — “Iraq war” and “Milli Vanilli scandal” — is enough to accidentally bring the Voyager 2 back down to Cape Canaveral, Florida.
Frank might be the most confusing piece of the whole puzzle; the man we see on screen is despicable studio slime, and that makes the reveal of his role as a producer all that much more intriguing. Schweighöfer plays an always cranky, never honest, monogamously challenged Frank from the get-go and refuses to let the real Farian’s closeness to the project push the role into a hagiography or apology. He’s just a gross businessman, and that’s about all there is to it.
I also appreciated the critical peering into the music industry that built and profited off these two men. Fab and Rob, at least according to the film, never wanted to trick people; they always wanted to sing. They always wanted to be more involved. Like musicians young and old, they got stuck in contract limbo and were forced to bend the knee to their producer. One of the bands Frank steals music from to make Milli Vanilli famous makes an appearance, one that begins with one of the band members hearing their song (sung by someone else, who is also someone other than the person they think is singing their song) on the radio in a car that pulled up to a gas station pump where one of the band member’s works. The occupational choice instantly signals the disparity between the luxury lives Fab and Rob live and the life quality of the original artist. Another scheming catfishing scandal comes through fan mail Rob receives from an American GI formerly stationed in Munich claiming to be his father. They form a close bond on the phone before his dad asks for $60,000 to send his younger child to college; Rob calls him out on the scam attempt and Verhoeven cuts away from the Black military official stationed in Alaska who we thought was his dad and to a younger, white man on the phone in a crowded urban apartment.
The subplots of treachery, betrayal, and dishonesty echo the larger narrative of Milli Vanilli’s specific stardom but also stardom in general. In all honesty, if the same thing were to happen in 2024, I’m not sure it would be that big of a deal. Maybe the establishment saves face by revoking any awards just like Milli Vanilli and their Grammy. Perhaps not, though. Regardless of what I think or could predict, people are all over Twitter lauding fake, AI-generated music as we speak. If casual listeners will champion music not even produced by humans, does it really feel so unbelievable that their careers would end on the spot? Call me skeptical.
Girl You Know It’s True
2023
dir. Simon Verhoeven
124 min.
Opens in theaters Friday, 8/9 (though, unfortunately, nowhere locally)
Joshua Polanski is a freelance film and culture writer who writes regularly for the Boston Hassle and In Review Online. He has contributed to the Bay Area Reporter, Off Screen, and DMovies amongst other places. His interests include the technical elements of filmmaking & exhibition, slow & digital cinemas, cinematic sexuality, as well as Eastern and Northern European, East Asian, & Middle Eastern film.
