YOGAWOMAN examines the empowering qualities of of yoga and its positive effects on the female life cycle
YOGAWOMAN (Kate Clare McIntyre & Saraswati Clere, 2011)
Angelika Film Center
18 West Houston St. at Mercer St.
Opens Friday, October 19
www.yogawoman.tv
www.angelikafilmcenter.com
Yoga has come a long way, baby, as shown in the award-winning documentary Yogawoman. Unfortunately, however, this eighty-four-minute look at the transition of the art and practice of yoga from a male-exclusive method of finding inner peace to a woman-dominated community is a self-congratulatory infomercial that basically preaches to the converted. Dryly narrated by yoga enthusiast Annette Bening, who sounds like she had something better to do, Yogawoman is a family affair, written and directed by Kate McIntyre Clere (A Hard Place, Gaining Ground) and her sister Saraswati Clere and produced and photographed by Kate’s husband, Michael McIntyre. The film portrays the yoga world — indeed, it’s an international affair, visiting Japan, Australia, India, Germany, Kenya, and the UK in addition to various cities in the US (primarily New York and San Francisco) — as a tight-knit collection of women who use yoga not only for physical exercise and easing the mind but to play a key role in the overall life cycle, having positive effects on menstruation, sexuality, pregnancy, eating habits, the aging process, and battling cancer. Among the parade of talking heads who speak while sitting in front of the same blue background are Seane Corn, Angela Farmer, Cyndi Lee, Tari Prinster, and Patricia Walden, superstars in the field who sing the praises of the ever-growing discipline, but it all comes off as New Agey and self-important. There’s no doubt that yoga is beneficial and empowering in so many ways, but Yogawoman sells it like it’s a magic elixir that will cure all of your — and this troubled world’s — ills. Yogawoman opens October 19 at the Angelika; the filmmakers and various women who appear in the movie will participate in Q&A sessions following the screenings at 7:00 on Friday and Saturday and 3:00 on Sunday.
The first half of Julia Loktev’s second feature film, The Loneliest Planet, is a dazzling tour de force, as young lovers Alex (Gael García Bernal) and Nica (Hani Furstenberg) revel in all that life has to offer. Shortly before getting married, they have decided to go on a hiking trip through the Caucasus Mountains in Georgia, led by a guide named Dato (real-life mountaineer Bidzina Gudjabidze, in his first acting role). Alex and Nica are fresh and alive, their eyes filled with wonder, their faces in perpetual, infectious smiles as they make their way through spectacular landscapes gorgeously photographed by cinematographer Inti Briones. In several shots, the three hikers are barely visible walking in the distance as Briones focuses on breathtaking views of the lush green mountainside and vast Central Asian landscape (as well as, in close-up, Furstenburg’s dazzling red hair). What little dialogue there is doesn’t really matter; in fact, much of it is hard to hear, more like background noise, and what is spoken in foreign languages isn’t even translated. But when the travelers run into three locals, something happens that upends the dynamic and severely changes the relationship among Alex, Nica, and Dato, something that requires the kind of split-second decision that one can never take back, resulting in a return journey that is much darker, the smiles, laughter, and romance disappearing in a stark moment. Based on Tom Bissell’s short story “Expensive Trips Nowhere,” The Loneliest Planet recalls such seminal works as Mikhail Kalatozov’s The Letter Never Sent, Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker, John Boorman’s Deliverance, Akira Kurosawa’s Dersu Uzala, and Roberto Rosselini’s Voyage in Italy, in which location serves as a character of mystery and potential danger. Loktev, a visual artist who previously made the 1998 documentary Moment of Impact, which details her family’s very personal experiences after her father was hit by a car, and her 2006 narrative debut, Day Night Day Night, about a female Palestinian suicide bomber, has crafted a mesmerizing tale built around small subtleties and the tender, fragile nature of human relationships, in which one misstep can have shattering consequences. Mexican actor García Bernal and New York-born Israeli star Furstenberg make a terrifically believable couple, so vibrant in the first half, so tentative and subdued in the latter sections. The Loneliest Planet is having a special preview screening on October 17 as part of the Museum of the Moving Image’s “See It Big!” series, with Loktev and Furstenberg on hand to talk about the film, which opens October 26 at the IFC Center.
