As a biopic of the Grammy-winning, then not-Grammy winning dance pop duo Milli Vanilli, “Girl You Know It’s True” suggests the story you thought you knew is not real.
“Girl” presents a, to put it mildly, unflattering portrait of the music industry as it tells its sad story.
“It’s a movie about two great musicians with a big dream who met the wrong people and weren’t allowed to be real,” Matthias Schweighöfer, who plays their “creator” Frank Farian, said in a Zoom interview from Germany. “What I love about this movie is it shows that you need to communicate and you need to be real. That’s always the right path.
“Because the story is about fulfilling your big dreams, ‘The sky is the limit!’ you need to stop when things are going wrong.”
Rob Pilatus (Tijan Njie) and Fabrice Morvan (Elan Ben Ali), Black kids from, respectively, Germany and France, attracted attention as a break-dancing duo in clubs. They were signed by Farian, a major Munich music producer, who loved music, lived for music but recognized their look – elaborate braids, chiseled bodies – meant millions in the MTV era.
But from the start Farian lied to these naïve newcomers.
The title song, which in 1989 became the first of the duo’s five global hits? Stolen from the original Maryland-based version. Its copyrighted lyrics and composing royalties ignored — until a successful lawsuit.
Singing? Rob and Fab were repeatedly promised they would sing … on future albums. Never happened.
After the revelation they had lip-synced rather than sung their songs, Milli Vanilli’s Grammys were nullified, as was their appeal. After several comeback attempts and rehab Pilatus, 33, died of an accidental overdose in 1998. Morvan lives with his wife and kids in Amsterdam.
Farian, who engineered their international success, died last January. “I met Frank one time. We just spoke over Zoom. Of course, he was quite a character. He has a bit of everything: Villain. A man who loved music. Hypocrite? Maybe.
“I grew up in the 90s — and when I heard the story for the first time, I was pretty surprised. My character loved to make music. He lived somewhere near Munich — everything started with that. He needed dancers and Rob and Fab came, and then everything went wrong pretty fast.
Today Schweighöfer wonders how people would react, “It’s totally different with all these social platforms they use. Kind of, ‘Hey, even if you’re not the performer, you’re the performer’ right?
“I thought, What would have happened if they really would have communicated? And what they did — how would that really have changed the music? It would have changed the perception.”
“Girl You Know It’s True” is available on VOD and streaming platforms Friday.