Friday 22 February 2013

"Breath of the Gods" (Guardian 22/02/13)


Breath of the Gods (U) 100 mins **

Ominously billed as “A Journey into the Origins of Modern Yoga”, this one’s niche, to say the least. German documentarist Jan Schmidt-Garre has gone to India and brought back a wearyingly attenuated history of stretching: footage of sages discussing stretching, intercut with footage of people stretching, and scratchy archive footage of people stretching as they used to in olden times. (It hasn’t changed much.) Schmidt-Garre does little to turn this scholarly exercise into cinema, and his Teutonic seriousness is grinding when not ripe for parody. Where’s Mad Lizzie when we need her? 

Breath of the Gods opens in selected cinemas from today.

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