See a woman buried alive for three days and emerge fresh as a daisy! See a man who has held his arm up over his head for 20 years!
It's all here in Short Cut to Nirvana: Kumbh Mela, a documentary about an event that makes the Burning Man festival look rather puny and tame. The Kumbh Mela is an ancient celebration of spirituality that, beginning in the year 500 B.C., has been held every 12 years in the area where the sacred waters of the Ganges and Yamuna rivers converge in India. With an estimated 70 million pilgrims attending the most recent event, it is also the largest gathering of humans on the planet.
Short Cut to Nirvana is filmmakers Maurizio Benazzo and Nick Day's record of that most recent Kumbh Mela, held in 2001. But while you'll get an eyeful of extravagantly odd behavior and circus-like atmosphere, there's not much effort expended in putting the material into context or organizing it any discernable way. And if it's illumination that you're after, well, you can forget about that too.
On the other hand, if it's the rush of pure sensationalism you desire, look no further than Short Cut to Nirvana. The film is a flurry of strange sights and sounds, full of wizened, dreadlocked gurus — including a swami who swings on a throne of nails over a fiery pit and another one who wraps his penis around a stick and invites people to balance on it — and slamgazing our way through the exotica all too often has the effect of reducing what we're seeing to its crudest, carnival sideshow aspect.
There's much to gawk at here, but not much meaning. Short Cut to Nirvana occasionally intersperses all the sound and fury with talking heads (a pair of visiting New Yorkers offer scattered comments, and various gurus offer nuggets of wisdom like "We are all one," or sing "Love is my religion" to the tune of "We Shall Overcome"), but there's not much resonance to be found in this sound-bite-friendly format.
Short Cut to Nirvana: Kumbh Mela (NR) opens Oct. 21 at Tampa Theatre. Call to confirm. 3 stars
This article appears in Oct 19-25, 2005.