"Milli Vanilli, from glory to nightmare": the story of one of the most famous scams in the history of pop music

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Certainly, "Milli Vanilli" does not aim to reach the level of "Phantom of the Paradise", the absolute flagship of music industry satire, but there is in Simon Verhoeven's film (no relation to the Dutchman Paul), an adaptation of a true story, the same fascination mixed with irony for the monstrous underbelly of the pop scene, protagonists of the same nature - megalomaniacal suckers and evil geniuses. Robert Pilatus and Fabrice Morvan belong to the first category: between social revenge and the race to the bottom, these two black breakdancers, pure physical ersatz of each other, wiggle in the fashionable discos of Munich in the mid-1980s, convinced that fame is first and foremost a hair matter - Elvis and Marilyn had an emblematic haircut in common, they note, it is up to them to invent their own. Until the day Frank Farian, the German kingpin of the successful Boney M., catapulted them to the forefront, frontmen, in the literal sense, of a band that sang hits put together in the shadows by the all-powerful producer. The Milli Vanilli deception would work at full speed, seducing the American market, bathing the duo in a semblance of glory and power, before bursting in mid-flight, like a speculative bubble.

The charm of the film, the fruit of a mind-blowing diplomatic consensus between the different parts of the group, all co-producers, is less about making this affair a major turning point than, on the contrary, recalling its purely anecdotal dimension as a seedy epiphenomenon, governed by the simple logic of show business (law of the strongest, conflicts of interest, triumph of marketing). However, it recounts with astonishing accuracy the last hours of a part of the European entertainment industry thought of as a counterfeit of American mass culture: with their West Coast rapper look and their English-language songs, Milli Vanilli is part of a line of malicious (or cynical) copyists from the Old Continent, from Johnny Hallyday to Italian B movies.