HBO depicts the disco queen at a distance

Love to You, Donna Summer debuts on Saturday, May 20, on HBO.

HBO

This may sound odd now, but when Donna Summer first hit America’s pop music charts in 1975, it was a steamy, scandalous moment.

Her first hit, “Love to Love You Baby,” featured Summer making noises of pleasure which sounded seriously sexual, inspiring the BBC to initially refuse to play the record and interviewers to ask what exactly she was doing while tracking the vocals.

But as Summer explains in a clip from HBO’s documentary Love to Love You, Donna Summer, the singer was not actually a sultry, sexy seductress.

“It wasn’t me, it was something I was playing,” she says. “It was a role. Everyone that knew me would call me up and say, ‘That’s not you, [moaning on the record] is it?’ Yeah, it’s me.”

A secretive artist

Unfortunately, HBO’s film struggles to define who Summer actually was, despite knitting together interviews with family members, archival clips and home movie footage — all guided, in part, by her daughter Brooklyn Sudano.

Summer’s daughter, Brooklyn Sudano.

HBO

Sudano co-directed the film with Oscar- and Emmy-winning documentarian Roger Ross Williams, searching for meaning in her mother’s story. The movie notes even Summer’s children sometimes found her tough to know — including one scene in which Sudano’s sister, Amanda Ramirez, talks about how secretive their mother could be.

“We were never allowed in her room; the door was always locked,” Ramirez says. “We would find out things…