REVIEW: GIRL YOU KNOW IT’S TRUE (2023) dir. Simon Verhoeven

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.

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