Enlighten Up: How to Make a Really Bad Documentary (Also, Yoga)

In Enlighten Up!, filmmaker and yoga practitioner Kate
Churchill makes it her goal “to prove that yoga can transform anyone.”
Her method: Recruit a willing guinea pig—Nick Rosen, an itinerant
journalist—and follow him through a full-scale yogic immersion,
from “hot yoga” classes in New York City to a weekend of “yoga for
dudes” in Los Angeles to extended adventures in yoga-soaked India. From
this proven crowd-pleaser of a concept—Yogafy Me!, essentially—Churchill somehow manages to wring one of the more
exasperating films I’ve ever been required to sit through.

The film’s problems announce themselves early, as Churchill
establishes her film’s basic components—the who/what/why of
Enlighten Up!—with an adamant lack of grace. Information
is provided through chunks of on-screen text, which don’t just appear
but are typed out, letter by letter, in slower than real time. A
similar temporal klutziness runs through the film’s interviews, which
often involve not just questions being asked and answered but
conceived: Nick says, “You should ask me about _____.” “Oh
yeah,” responds Kate from behind the camera. “Tell me about _____.”
“Well,” says Nick, “when I was doing _____…” The presence of such
Editing 101 missteps is pervasive enough that I began to wonder if they
were the point. “Maybe it’s a statement on the importance of ‘the
process,'” I allowed, with dread.

The majority of the film follows Nick and Kate as they visit various
yoga notables around the globe (Kate may not understand much about
filmmaking, but she’s aces at funding and access). Everywhere, Nick or
Kate or both Nick and Kate ask variations of the question “what is true
yoga?” with various wise yogis giving variations of the same answer: It
is a spiritual and physical practice, and it is not Out There but right
where you are. Like deaf wanderers with a camera crew, Nick and Kate
hear nothing of the wisdom they’ve so strenuously solicited, opting
instead to keep wandering and questioning and babbling until,
apparently, the budget was spent. As a documentary about the power of
yoga, Enlighten Up! is a failure. But as a documentary about
the eternally slippery simplicity of yoga (and the making of a bad
documentary), it’s almost worthwhile.