Enlightenment Guaranteed

(Erleuchtung garantiert). Writer-director Doris Dörrie creates a sweetly comic and spiritually enlightened work reminiscent of her earlier international success, Men. Two brothers-Gustav, a feng shui expert, and Uwe, an utter slob who has just been left by his wife-want to get their screwed-up lives together by traveling to Japan for a retreat in a Zen monastery. Their first lesson in the Zen concept of “leaving everything behind” is absorbed with unanticipated literalness. Life in the monastery is an immersion of a more subtle kind: here the mundane and the sublime merge in liminal ways. Although the enigma of enlightenment continues to elude them, the brothers are nonetheless changed forever.

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