With its TV-style production values and bland educational tone, Naked in Ashes might be suitable for PBS or the Discovery Channel, but it's not much of a feature film. Paula Fouce's documentary follows several Indian yogis, religious ascetics who, as one might infer from the title, wear little or no clothing and cover themselves in ashes, live in makeshift huts along the banks of the Ganges River and go on long pilgrimages to the Himalayas and, every 12 years, to the Kumbh Mela, a huge religious festival that provides the climax to the film (and was itself the subject of the recent documentary Short Cut to Nirvana).
Fouce spends lots of time with her subjects, following them everywhere they go, and she clearly has great admiration for the yogis and what they do. But aside from a few discussions of the way that the men believe the Indian government is messing up the country, there is little insight into how these people interact with the world at large, or what their practices mean in anything but the most narrow sense. A further distancing effect is achieved by Fouce's decision to use voice-over narration rather than subtitles to translate her subjects' words. No matter what the yogis are talking about, their thoughts are expressed in a calm, even tone by English-speaking voices with mild Indian accents. It's hard to reconcile those voices with the naked, hairy and often wild-looking people on the screen, and the effect is only exacerbated by Fouce's choice to focus on a pre-adolescent yogi-in-training, whose point-of-view narration in a cloying kid's voice suggests that the film might be suitable as one of those interstitial pieces on Sesame Street that teaches children about other cultures. It's hard to believe that this boy actually speaks in such lucid expository sentences, but Fouce often has the voice-overs unsynchronized to the action, so there's really no way to tell.
Even if Naked in Ashes is too tame and superficial, it's hard not to be impressed by some of its subjects; no one can watch a yogi pull a jeep with his penis and not be amazed. Too bad Fouce couldn't tap into more of that sense of wonder.