Love to Love You, Donna Summer – first-look review | Little White Lies

Festivals

Love to Love You, Don­na Sum­mer – first-look review

22 Feb 2023

Words by Anna Bogutskaya

Performer with voluminous curly hair on stage, wearing a white feathered costume and holding a microphone.
Performer with voluminous curly hair on stage, wearing a white feathered costume and holding a microphone.
Acad­e­my Award win­ner Roger Ross Williams and Summer’s daugh­ter Brook­lyn Sudano team up to cre­ate an inti­mate por­trait of a con­flict­ed and com­pli­cat­ed artist.

There are two doc­u­men­taries about icon­ic female musi­cians play­ing at this year’s Berli­nale. First up, Joan Baez I Am A Noise, and then Love to Love You, Don­na Sum­mer, co-direct­ed by Roger Ross Williams and Summer’s own daugh­ter, Brook­lyn Sudano. Both films are inter­est­ed in explor­ing the mul­ti­ple per­sonas that exist simul­ta­ne­ous­ly with­in artists of the size and influ­ence of Joan Baez and Don­na Summer.

How many roles do I play in my own life?”Summer pon­ders in an inter­view. Love to Love You, Don­na Sum­mer is an inti­mate por­trait of an artist and the mul­ti­ple roles she played for dif­fer­ent peo­ple in her life, includ­ing raw con­ver­sa­tions with her daugh­ters and their expe­ri­ence of a lov­ing, but large­ly absent, moth­er. Through archive inter­views and audio inter­views with Summer’s fam­i­ly and clos­est col­lab­o­ra­tors, as well as new footage of Sudano bal­anc­ing mak­ing a film with get­ting to know her mother’s life more inti­mate­ly than ever.

Love to Love You, Don­na Sum­mer starts, con­ve­nient­ly, with the 1975 track that gives the doc­u­men­tary its name, open­ing with Summer’s breathy, orgas­mic into­na­tion of the song. When Love to Love You Baby” was released, Sum­mer was set­tled in Ger­many with her first hus­band, Hel­muth Som­mer (whose name she adapt­ed into her stage name) and a steady career singing bub­blegum pop. Sum­mer rel­ished the free­dom that Europe offered her, a respite from her con­ser­v­a­tive upbring­ing, Boston’s racism and the painful mem­o­ry of abuse suf­fered at the hands of a church pastor.

After the sin­gle hit it off, she returned to the US a star, posi­tioned by her label as the first lady of love”, keen on max­imis­ing a sul­try image that went well with the track. Summer’s inter­nal con­flict with the dis­co sex queen per­sona that had gar­nered her suc­cess and her own beliefs make the com­pelling core of the doc­u­men­tary (“I’m nev­er gonna be able to go to church again,” her moth­er said after the suc­cess of Love to Love You Baby”).

The film­mak­ers shine a light on the artistry that went into every ele­ment of her music and just how much of that came from Sum­mer her­self. Her approach to per­for­mance is revealed to be clos­er to that of an actress. I’m not try­ing to be me,” she says. Every song is akin to embody­ing a char­ac­ter and her live per­for­mances had an almost the­atre-like struc­ture, with a char­ac­ter, a con­flict and a resolution.

The film reveals the often under-appre­ci­at­ed musi­cian­ship of Sum­mer. She not only wrote or co-wrote most of her songs, but often came up with the inven­tive touch­es that ele­vat­ed a decent track into a run­away hit, like the toot toot, beep beep” that kicks off Bad Girls”. She is shown as obsessed with direct­ing and, hav­ing bought a cam­era, makes short films with her fam­i­ly and friends.

Her dif­fi­cult rela­tion­ship with fame and the demands of pop super­star­dom comes to a head mul­ti­ple times. A fraught rela­tion­ship with her daugh­ter, who she can­not take on the road with her. An abu­sive rela­tion­ship with a man threat­ened by her suc­cess. A label who she had to sue for mis­man­ag­ing the prof­its from her work. Love to Love You, Don­na Sum­mer doesn’t shy away from the con­tro­ver­sy that would plague the lat­ter part of Summer’s life, after she had become a born-again Chris­t­ian and used her live shows to talk about faith more than disco.

At one such gig, she made the throw­away com­ment that God didn’t make Adam and Steve, he made Adam and Eve,” which under­stand­ably dev­as­tat­ed her LGBT fans, cre­at­ing waves of protests and a stain on Summer’s rep­u­ta­tion right until her death in 2012 from lung cancer.

In lieu of trod­ding the famil­iar behind the music” beats of pop doc­u­men­taries, Williams and Sudano focus on the com­pli­cat­ed tug-and-pull of Summer’s artistry, her glob­al fame and volatile per­son­al life.

Lit­tle White Lies is com­mit­ted to cham­pi­oning great movies and the tal­ent­ed peo­ple who make them.

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