The Reel Review
Milli Vanilli is the only recipient in Grammy history forced to give back their award – in 1990, for Best New Artist – after it was later discovered that Rob Pilatus and Fabrice Morvan were lip synching and didn’t sing a single note on their album. This documentary examines the German-French duo’s meteoric rise and equally spectacular fall, as well as a money-driven pop music industry that was at least partly complicit until the controversy left the suddenly infamous duo as the scapegoats.
Director Luke Korem (Action, Dealt) doesn’t reveal any new facts not already in the Milli Vanilli Wikipedia article. But his documentary does paint a pretty good portrait of the unique circumstances that allowed two European club promoters from broken homes and with broken English to make it big. Sadly, he doesn’t get the interviews with the big powerbrokers involved in their success – in particular, Svengali-like producer and mastermind Frank Farian, Arista Records’ Clive Davis (who has vehemently denied knowing they were frauds), late super-agent Sandy Gallin and NARAS president C. Michael Greene. The question of who all was in on the lip synching is left dangling.
That said, the people who ARE interviewed – Fabrice Morvan, Frank Farian’s then girlfriend/assistant Ingrid Segieth, the actual session singers who provided the album’s vocals, and MTV’s Downtown Julie Brown, who toured with Milli Vanilli and witnessed the beginning of their demise – give a pretty interesting perspective on the whole scandal, and how nearly everyone knew the Grammy nomination would spell the duo’s certain doom. Some of the production is sloppy (Associated Press is incorrectly not capitalized) and some archival interviews are dated. But as tragic as the film is, with the death of Pilatus in 1998 – it does end on an upbeat note. Morvan finally ended up with a career as a singer.
REEL FACTS
• John Davis, one of the actual Milli Vanilli vocalists who later performed with Morvan as the group Face Meets Voice, died from COVID in May 2021. He was 66.
• Frank Farian, now 82, lives in Miami, Florida.
• Downtown Julie Brown is married to film producer Martin Schuemann. They live in Marina Del Ray, California with their daughter.
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