Crossing Delancey

Isabelle is in her thirties and lives in a small apartment on the west side of Manhattan. She works in a bookshop; her life is full of writers, readings and the literary circle. Once a week she goes downtown to the Lower East Side where her grandmother lives. The grandmother wants her granddaughter married and hires a matchmaker. The matchmaker finds a candidate: Sam, a man who sells pickles in the neighbourhood. Isabelle finds this humiliating. At the same time she is taken with a famous writer who comes into the shop. She is expected to choose between two worlds, and the easy side of the choice looks more attractive to her. Joan Micklin Silver directs. Amy Irving plays Isabelle, Peter Riegert plays Sam and Reizl Bozyk the grandmother. The source is Susan Sandler's own play. Reizl Bozyk was a well known actor of the Yiddish theatre and this was her only film. The matter it treats is class and origin; what Isabelle is running from is the neighbourhood itself. It was shot in real locations in New York and records the Lower East Side as it was then. The narrative uses the shape of romantic comedy but does not make the choice easy; the writer is plainly ill intentioned. Its best side is the scenes between grandmother and granddaughter; the relationship is not sweetened. Its limit is predictability; the outcome is clear within the first half hour. Who it is for: viewers who like New York comedies of the eighties and romance grounded in character. Who it is not for: it is predictable, slow, and the genre shape is very plain.