Crossing Delancey - 1988

Crossing Delancey - Released Jan 1, 1988. Directed by Joan Micklin Silver

New York City romantic comedy in which bookstore employee and conventional modern feminist Isabelle Grossman (Amy Irving) is maneuvered into an arranged date by her grandmother (called 'Bubbe' in the film, a Yiddish word for Grandmother, played by Reizl Bozyk in the film) who has hired a professional "matchmaker" (played by Sylvia Miles) to find her granddaughter a man. A local Jewish pickle-maker (Sam, played by Peter Riegert) is the man.

When they meet, Isabelle dislikes him on general principal ("this is not how I live, this is a hundred years ago" she protests) and in the process she casually and accidentally insults him, and is alarmed to learn he is a match for her vocabulary and can recognize her latent snobbery.

A lot of Hollywood films of the past featured romance through mutual irritation, and there's a good dose of it here, but well beyond that is a different sort of tale in which the past (humorously represented by Rozyk's Bubbe) and the modern edge of isolated alienation are balanced over Riegert's unassuming pickleman. A secondary theme is the lament of modern New York women unable to find a reasonably stable young man for a relationship though apparently they're all around if you know how to spot them, or at least get a matchmaker on the job of hunting them down. Rooted into the Jewish community of the Big Apple, the film is amused by them and the fringe of the culture interacting with the rest of the boiling-pot of cultures in the city, and in a way is a bit of a mash note to the multicultural New York of 1988.

An irony in the movie is that the star character of Isabelle is an aficionado of the literary arts, a dreamy-eyed dedication leaving her vulnerable in that world, though she's quite able to take care of herself once her eyes are opened. Her infatuation with arrogant, manipulative writer Anton Maes (sounds like "moss") played very effectively by Jeroen Krabbe, is based upon the fact he is a writer, and here's the irony, but so is the Pickleman, just not in the usual sense of the word.

There are a legion of New York City based romantic comedies from across the history of cinema. The city, if filmed the right way of course (and Crossing Delancey seems to be filmed at the height of Autumn), lends itself well to being the third character in any tale of two people straightening out why they dislike each other, and the city keeps throwing them back together until they figure out why: its because they're in love.

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Original Page May 2016 | Updated November 2024