Raj Kapoor's unusual and literally disfigured love story "Satyam Shivam Sundaram" (translated as,Truth Godliness Beauty) is one of the most sensationalistic Bollywood films ever produced. It's pretense is based on a touching love story about a disfigured young woman who shows a vain man that beauty is more than skin deep. The theme may be "Beauty and the Beast" but the out come is as one critic states, "more skin than story". Never in a Hindi Popular Film before or for that matter since, has so much of a woman's body (as in popular Bollywood slang) been "revealed". The heroine of "Satyam Shivam Sundaram", Zeenat Aman, for the most part wanderers through the film wearing a see through swatch of cloth the size of a dish towel and nothing else. With her breasts exposed, overflowing, and damp with perspiration, as she vigorously washes a temple lingham, it is hard to separate the exploitative and voyeuristic from the sensual religious devotion the scene attempts to express. Raj Kapoor would have been the first to admit, and has stated to the matter that in movies, sex sells. In many of his films like "Bobby" and "Aware", Kapoor masterfully melded the fire and ice of sex and message to achieve a balance called Popular Entertainment. Yet with "Satyam Shivam Sundaram" something has defiantly gone awry, surrealistically amok, hormonally unbalanced, and misguided.

The film is flawed, Freudian, lurid, and at points hackneyed. Yet there are moments of great beauty and film mastery. Zeenat Aman both makes the film memorable and ruins the film at the same time. Her incredible and voluptuous near nakedness is "Satyam Shivam Sundaram" and such a Brechtian distraction one forgets about the films story in order to gaze at her. Her scene in the tiny dish rag size sari bathing under a waterfall has become the stuff of scandalous legend in Bollywood. One has to question the fine line between "high art" and "low art" while watching "Satyam Shivam Sundaram" and the answer becomes complex and falls open to evolving discussion. To simply call this film kitsch and exploitative would be too simple. Actually one of the most fascinating aspects of "Satyam Shivam Sundaram" is how it affects the viewer, how the spectator reacts to the film at hand. What does "Satyam Shivam Sundaram", in the way 'you' view it, say about you and your psyche in the face of, or explotiation of, "Satyam Shivam Sundaram" = Truth Godliness Beauty.

Photo Galleries taken from "Satyam Shivam Sundaram" : Zeenat Aman --- Shashi Kapoor