Zaheer iqbal movie

Can picture-postcard images paper over misshapen pockmarks left on a film by a pair of rough-on-the-edges new actors finding their tentative way through a sloppy screenplay and going around in circles? If Notebook, Nitin ' Filmistaan' Kakkar's third film, is anything to go by, the answer is a big, resounding no. The callow lead pair, Zaheer Iqbal and Pranutan Bahl, are called upon to exude unadulterated passion in an affected love story in which they do not physically meet until the very end of the film. By then, Notebook is in tatters and the audience is snoring (that is if the ear-splitting background score lets you doze off). Cinematographer Manoj Kumar Khatoi's camerawork captures lush, stunning Kashmiri vistas - undulating landscapes covered with flaming chinar leaves, water bodies refracting the sun and the moon in all their splendour, snow-covered peaks peeping into the lens from a distance - in a steady stream that lends the film its surface sheen. It is captivating all right, but it cannot pull Notebook out of the senseless narrative swamp that it wades through in its attempt to deliver an unusual story of young love set in a strife-ridden paradise where anger and anguish reside side by side. Adapted by screenwriter Darab Farooqui from Teacher's Diary, Thailand's official entry for the Oscars in 2014, Notebook transports the original tale from a rural school to a remote location in the Valley, where a small institution floating in a lake is on the verge of being s...