I had just finished Kiran Desai’s new book over the week and I think the feeling that the book created sort of lingered on over the weekend. It was a long read and I wanted to take a break from reading for the weekend. Aching to eat some desi Chinese for lunch on Sunday, I made vegetable chowmein. Yes, you heard it right. Our very own desi “thela” version of noodles. Bowls full of slurpy goodness and my husband and I plopped on the sofa to browse our next watch.

Frankie and Johnny was an easy pick considering Michelle Pfeiffer and Al Pacino were playing the main roles. To see Al Pacino in a romantic drama and lose the tough brute character was a total mood killer for my husband. How much I enjoyed his discomfort!

The film begins with introducing Frankie and Johnny, showing their struggles with career, love and just about everything. Johnny is fresh out of the prison from committing a crime that he was tricked into. He is trying to find work in New York but there’s hope in that he finally knows what he wants to pursue. He is separated from his wife and kids and is pretty much dealing with everything by himself. Frankie works as a waitress at a shanty little cafe in New York City and is living a regular life. Having had an intense past with her boyfriend, she has learned to stay away from love and get on with the average life of a single person in the big city.

Johnny joins the little cafe as a chef and the two meet at work. No meet-cute, no destiny and fireworks – just two colleagues at a work place, trying to get to know each other. Johnny is boisterous to a point of being annoying when he’s pursuing Frankie. She is quiet, drawn out. After much persuasion from Johnny, she agrees to go on one date with him and they hit it off instantly. That first date is filmed so beautifully – the two of them attend a colleague’s party, Johnny buys flowers for Frankie, they end the night at Frankie’s home. Through it all, they’re talking, getting to know one another. Johnny is unabashed, quick to confess his love. Frankie is recluse, self preserving from what may hurt her.

There’s no big romantic gesture or no loud happy ending to this love story. What actually makes them come together is just them speaking about their past, sharing their darkest secrets and slowly trusting one another with it. Their brokenness and quiet loneliness is so beautifully captured in every scene they have together. The final scene is just perfect in that they are both sitting by the window at Frankie’s house, early in the morning. After an entire night of talking, fighting and going through the process of deeply understanding one another, they are wide awake to the possibility of going through with the day and maybe life, together.

Unpopular opinion that will receive much hate but I am going ahead and saying it – never understood the hype around Al Pacino until I saw him flawlessly carry this role. His ease to just move around like the character as though he is it, was a big win for me. Michelle Pfeiffer has a presence so strong, it’s impossible to not feel all the feels when she’s on screen.

This film is grounded and subtle, comes with its flaws but worth every penny you pay on Amazon to rent it. A cheap purchase compared to the Border 2 movie tickets and popcorn tubs that will take away 4 hours of your life?

-Aishwarya Bedekar