Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic Sometimes, when a documentary has a great subject, it can explore that subject with an intimacy that’s arresting, only to treat other aspects of the story with a kind of cavalier casualness. “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’s full of home movies and photographs and archival footage of Donna Summer, and it creates an eye-opening portrait of the ambitious yet deeply disconsolate woman she was.
We see her when she was growing up in Boston, where she sang gospel in church and felt a gift passing through her, knowing that she was going to be famous, or when she moved to Munich in 1968, at 19, to be in the German production of “Hair” (there’s a startling clip of her onstage, in long dark pigtails, singing “Aquarius” in German), or later on, after she’d become a pop star, at home with her daughters, lost in the empty mirror of fame.
The two sides of Summer are embodied in her contrasting looks. When she was up onstage, commanding arenas, shimmying her shoulders like the sultry disco diva she was, her face was made up into a kind of mask (blue eye shadow, crimson lips, purple cheeks, big round eyes and plucked lashes that became part of the mask), topped by a mountain of curls that were like no one else’s.
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