The best thing about watching Love to Love You, Donna Summer, is how it reminds us of just what a terrific performer she was. Summer didn’t simply sing, she was a storyteller, not only with her songs but with her whole stage sets, also creating concept albums long before they were a common part of the recording industry. HBO’s documentary, directed by Roger Ross Williams (Music by Prudence) and Summer’s daughter Brooklyn Sudano, is and isn’t what you’d expect from a movie about the star made with family involvement: it doesn’t shy away from her inner demons, but it leaves major lacunae in her story.
Stuffed with archival footage including surprising home videos made by Summer herself, Love to Love You keeps almost all interviews as voice-over-only and strangely doesn’t discuss her influence on later generations of pop artists. Thankfully the film addresses, though all too briefly, Summer’s misguided, shameful anti-gay statement after finding religion, but the truly frustrating absence is the lack of any insight into her impact on, and relationship to, the black music scene of the era and beyond. While unlikely to attract Gen Z, the documentary should do well with the disco age demographic.
For a girl raised in a Boston family where propriety was key, whose early influence was Mahalia Jackson, it took a lot of gumption to burst onto the American music scene groaning as if on the brink of orgasm while singing “Love to Love You Baby.” That was in 1975, after Summer had achieved success while living in Germany – it’s great to see her performing in Hair – but had yet to cross the Atlantic. The song’s release changed all that, thrusting the then mother of one (she was briefly married to Austrian actor Helmuth Sommer) into the role of “first lady of love” and eroticizing her image in a way she had difficulty shaking. Performance footage of her gyrating with the mic stand, practically engulfing it between her legs, proves that she was more than game, plus she helped Giorgio Moroder to write the song. The documentary keeps underlining her contradictory elements, the disconnect between woman and public persona, yet what that means is Summer was human and a surprisingly good actress.
We hear a fair amount about her demons: she was molested by a minister when she was in her teens, and a string of relationships with abusive men testify to her troubled self-image. Her family is quite open about it, from her sisters, who performed back-up partly to ensure she had emotional (and physical) support, to her daughters and even her second husband Bruce Sudano, who admits their early years together were volatile. There’s a surprising amount of personal footage which Summer, who talked about wanting to learn how to make movies, shot herself, and there’s also a good deal of private recordings, in one of which she revealed she nearly committed suicide.
All this is set against her meteoric rise to international pop diva, thanks in great part to the love given her by the gay community. Love to Love You acknowledges this incontrovertible fact, yet the documentary isn’t probing enough to bother with explanations or analysis, so there’s no discussion of the role disco played in the late 1970s when gay clubs and saunas became exhilarating spaces where the driving beat of the music acted like a liberating catalyst to the open expression of our sexuality. That’s what made her repetition of Anita Bryant’s line “God created Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve” such a profound betrayal in the early ‘80s. Bruce Sudano admits here that they should have addressed the backlash immediately, but they didn’t until it was too late, and Summer’s continued on-stage born-again Christian preaching, though by that point rinsed of potential homophobia, wasn’t merely irksome, it was like a slap in the face.
To the documentary’s credit, this point is conceded. Bizarrely absent though is any mention of Summer’s fan base within the African-American community: in all the concert footage shown, the audiences are overwhelmingly white, but nowhere is this addressed, just as we don’t hear any black artists discussing her impact, though Elton John is briefly heard talking about the revolutionary sounds of “I Feel Love.” We hear her singing “MacArthur Park” but there’s no mention of the lyrics and their meaning, and while Summer’s 1979 duet with Barbra Streisand, “No More Tears (Enough is Enough)” gets some attention, it’s mostly about how Casablanca Records betrayed her wishes with its release, ignoring the cultural importance of this black and white superstar pairing.
In the end, Love to Love You succeeds in revealing Summer’s warmth and the intelligence of her artistic instincts as well as her rocky relationship to fame and the people around her. Better editing could have made it all more impactful, and it’s a shame that almost all the interviews are only in voice-over, but the archive footage used is generally excellent and Summer’s exceptional vocal and performative talents, too often minimized by the title of “the Queen of Disco,” are finally given their due. Codirectors Ross Williams and Sudano have made an affectionate portrait of a mother and icon, and while its haphazard superficialities feel like missed opportunities, their documentary is really all about giving back the love.
Director: Roger Ross Williams, Brooklyn Sudano
With: Mimi Dohler, Amanda Sudano Ramirez, Brooklyn Sudano, Dara Bernard, Mary Ellen Bernard, Ric Gaines, Jack Waddell, Helmuth Sommer, Joyce Trabulus, Susan Munao, Giorgio Moroder, Pete Bellotte, Elton John, Bruce Sudano, Peter Muhldorfer, Bobby Stewart
Producers: Julie Goldman, Christopher Clements, Carolyn Hepburn, Roger Ross Williams, David Blackman
Co-producers: J. Daniel Torres, Robert Komadina
Executive producers: Brooklyn Sudano, Bruce Sudano, Michele Anthony, Bruce Resnikoff, Monte Lipman, Brett Alperowitz, Nancy Abraham, Lisa Heller, Sara Rodriguez
Co-executive producer: Geoff Martz
Editing: Enat Sisi, Jon Smith, Jean Tsien
Music: T. Griffin
Sound: Leslie Shatz
Production companies: Polygram Entertainment (USA), Motto Pictures (USA), in association with One Story Up, Federal Films
World sales: HBO Documentary Films
Venue: Berlin Film Festival (Berlinale Special)
In English
107 minutes
