Breathing comic life into yoga quest

Nick Rosen spends six months traveling the globe to sample major and minor yoga disciplines.

"Enlighten Up!" presents a curious case of skepticism from the inside. Filmmaker Kate Churchill admits she has been a committed yoga practitioner for seven years; according to the press notes, the producers have also seen the light of the Sun Salutation. Yet the documentary, which plays the MFA this weekend before a weeklong run at the Kendall Square starting next Friday, knows that at least part of the $18 billion yoga industry is a crock and that some of the wise instructors are charlatans or fools.

But not all of them. Thus "Enlighten Up!," which is not quite as teeth-grindingly perky as its title, sends a neophyte out on the consciousness trail to separate the organic wheat from the chaff. Churchill settles on a young journalist named Nick Rosen, partly because being raised by hippie parents makes him open to but wary of New Age bromides, but mostly because he's a hunk - videogenic and smart.

Rosen embarks on a six-month sampler course through all the major yoga disciplines and a fair number of minor ones. He gets a taste of the Ashtanga school, Bikram yoga with its classroom thermostats set at 105 degrees, the numerology-oriented Kundalini yoga (Rosen acerbically dismisses this as "Kindaloony"), the "laughter yoga" of Dr. Madan Kataria, a self-styled "guru of giggling," and on and on around the globe.

"Enlighten Up!" casts a properly jaded eye at that part of the industry that spurns materialism while selling you a $55 "skidless yoga towel," and both filmmaker and subject are alert to spiritual double-talk. Their quest is a fundamentally earnest one, though, if given to such comic images as Rosen wrestling his legs into place while next to him another man already has his ankles wrapped around his own ears.

The extremes vary from a class run by a T&A-obsessed former pro wrestler - it's just a workout routine, basically - to the Hawaiian retreat of Norman Allen, who helped bring Ashtanga yoga to America during the 1970s. Today Allen is a sly white-bearded elder; at one point he gives the self-involved Rosen some direct and amusingly unprintable spiritual advice.

"Enlighten Up!" isn't the yoga primer it sometimes wants to be. Nowhere are the discipline's roots in Hinduism discussed or yoga's overlap with Buddhism and the modern meditation industry. (Spirituality is one thing, religion quite another.) Ultimately, Churchill is unable or unwilling to pull back and deliver a broader statement on why some of us seek in the first place, or how a profoundly inner-directed endeavor can get commercialized into just another "lifestyle." The movie ends happily but frustratingly where it began, with Rosen understanding that he has to be "his own true self." After all his travels, he's wiser but no smarter.

Ty Burr can be reached at tburr@globe.com. For more on movies, go to www.boston.com/movienation.