When a documentary has a big theme, it can explore that theme with attention-grabbing intimacy, only to treat other aspects of the story with a kind of arrogant nonchalance. “Love to Love You Donna Summer” is that kind of documentary. Co-directed by Roger Ross Williams and Brooklyn Sudano (who is Summer's daughter), it is filled with home movies, photographs and archival footage of Donna Summer, creating a revealing portrait of the ambitious, vivacious yet troubled woman that she was.
We see her as a child in Boston, where she sang gospel in church and felt a gift go through her, knowing she was going to be famous, or when she moved to Munich in 1968, at age 19, to be in the German production of "Hair", or later, after she became a pop star, at home with her daughters, lost in the mirror. void of fame
Directors: Brooklyn Sudano, Roger Ross Williams
Star: Donna Summer
The two sides of Summer are embodied in her contrasting looks. When she was onstage, commanding scenes, her shoulders moving like the sultry disco diva she was, her face was made up like a kind of mask—blue eyeshadow, crimson lips, purple cheeks, big round eyes, and plucked lashes that trailed off. part of the mask), topped off by a mountain of curls that weren't like anyone else's. All of that gave her wholesome beauty a slightly empty quality that made her the perfect avatar of disco. At home, without her makeup, we see the woman below her, often gloomy, exhausted and drained, living with underlying guilt and despair for all the time she spent on the road, leaving her daughters behind. small of her
“Love to Love You, Donna Summer” brings us closer to Donna Summer: the demons of her, her desire to be an artist, the feeling that when she was “Donna Summer”, she was a character that she was playing. That sort of thing is probably true of a lot of pop and rock stars (Mick Jagger wasn't hanging around like a rooster on acid in his living room), but in Summer's case, the tension was heightened by the role she played. was interpreting: the erotic dance. -Floor diva, who had launched her career by releasing moans of ecstasy on "Love to Love You Baby," which, given her extraordinary vocal talents, was somewhat transgressive for a woman. She blazed a trail. She wore the radical sex positivity of the disco, which she had done much to invent, as an outlandish costume.
But hopefully the film would give you a richer sense of Summer's development and identity as an artist. At the beginning, there's a clip of her singing "Lady of the Night," the catchy European pop song that was the title track on her 1974 debut album. Summer, at this point, sounds like Ronnie Spector crosses ABBA, and it's clear that she would have been a major pop singer even if disco never existed. That album marked her first collaboration with Giorgio Moroder (working with her songwriting and producing partner Pete Bellotte), but the movie doesn't even mention that. Summer's relationship with Moroder, the genius Italian disco wizard who became her mentor, protector, and studio recording collaborator, is covered for about 90 seconds, while the documentary touches on the recording of "I Feel Love," Throb's momentous epic that was the first pop single to use a drum machine. However, the arc of their connection remains vague. You'd never know that Moroder also wrote "Love to Love You Baby."
We see a clip of Neil Bogart, the founder of Casablanca Records, telling the legendary story about how he played a tape of "Love to Love You Baby" at a party (the song was then three minutes long), and his guests kept asking him to touch it again. It was then that he realized that the song should be longer, much longer, not a quick encounter but a prolonged erotic encounter. She contacted Moroder about it and a 17-minute version was released for dance clubs. The rest is orgasmic history.
This was all happening in the mid-'70s. We then hear Summer's voiceover, reflecting on the challenges of stardom, and the film suddenly flashes to footage of the Sunset Strip, along with footage of people flipping through record bins and finding copies of "Bad Girls", Summer's double album. that she activated that nightlife. "Bad Girls," released in 1979, was a tremendous album, as well as a defining event in Summer's career.
Watch Love to Love You, Donna Summer 2023 Movie Trailer
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