Girl You Know It's True

by Mike McGranaghan

The saga of Milli Vanilli looks a lot different today than it did in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s. At the time, there was something “off” about them. Their songs were massive, inescapable hits, yet their speaking voices suspiciously didn’t sound like their singing voices. Maybe it was a more naïve time, or perhaps the world just wanted to buy into the illusion. Either way, when it was confirmed that Rob Pilatus and Fab Morvan were the public face of Milli Vanilli and not the actual singers, it was downright scandalous. Today, the attitude seems to be, “Who cares? The music was great and it made people happy.”

Girl You Know It’s True is a dramatization of that entire event. It begins with Rob (Tijan Njie) and Fab (Elan Ben Ali) becoming friends after meeting at a dance audition, then making a name for themselves dancing in German nightclubs. They’re seen by Ingrid “Milli” Segieth (Bella Dayne), the assistant to music producer Frank Farian (Matthias Schweighöfer). He’s got a hot song but a band that’s not photogenic enough in the MTV-driven world, so the arrival of two stylish, good-looking dancers is like manna from Heaven. What follows sends Rob and Fab to the top of the charts, then into a cataclysmic downfall.

The complete true story is astonishing, and Girl You Know It’s True includes a lot of the lesser-known details. It convincingly makes the point that Rob and Fab got a disproportionate amount of blame for the deception, even though there were several other key participants. An interesting conceit is that the characters of Rob and Fab – and sometimes Farian – address the camera, filling in details and providing their perspectives on what we’re seeing. From that, you realize that everybody would have gladly kept up the lucrative charade had it not been exposed.

Although the facts are generally correct, writer/director Simon Verhoeven fails to put them in any deeper context. Girl You Know It’s True needed an Aaron Sorkin-level screenplay to fully dig into the complexities of the story – the willful deception, the exploitation of two young Black men by a white producer, the rationalizations Rob and Fab concocted to allow themselves to participate in the scheme, and so on. What we get is a truthful, yet shallow accounting of the Milli Vanilli saga without much commentary on what it all means.

Tijan Njie and Elan Ben Ali are very good. They look like Rob and Fab. More importantly, they capture the wild energy that existed between the two performers. Their casting is nothing short of a bullseye. Supporting characters, however, are largely stereotypes, especially the record company executives. They’re portrayed as comically shallow show biz phonies. That undermines the drama. The real execs were part of selling a product they knew was bogus. Letting them off the hook with cheap characterizations rather than holding their feet to the fire is a major miscalculation.

If you at all care about Milli Vanilli, Girl You Know It’s True will probably hold your attention, at least somewhat. But if you want a more incisive exploration of this piece of pop music history, the excellent Paramount+ documentary Milli Vanilli is a better bet.

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