"Enlighten Up!" illuminates the world of yoga

Inspired to make a documentary about yoga, the filmmaker Kate Churchill came up with a shrewd idea. Rather than focus on her own experience with the discipline, which she has practiced to great physical and spiritual benefit for many years, she enlisted a yoga novice to devote himself to it and report on its effects.

So she recruited Nick Rosen, 29, a physically fit, intellectually skeptical journalist from New York, to plunge into the world of yoga in search of a style that suited him. Approaching the subject through Rosen is a doubly smart strategy: It allows the uninitiated viewer to explore yoga through a surrogate, and it marginalizes Churchill's blatant agenda and rather grating personality.

Yoga appeals to Rosen as a superb workout more than as a route to enlightenment, and he tours the various studios and methods of the international yoga scene (from New York to Los Angeles and Hawaii before an extended, and fascinating, trip to India) with both an open mind and a dubious eye for its more metaphysical trappings. This clearly frustrates a filmmaker eager to acclaim the "transformative" aspects of the discipline.

As the title indicates, "Enlighten Up!" explores its subject with a light touch and welcome sense of humor. That it ends with a lack of resolution about yoga's ultimate goal suggests that Rosen wasn't the only one to gain some self-knowledge along the way.