Crossing Delancey

Another of the movies that I watched recently to try to free up some space on my DVR is Crossing Delancey.

Amy Irving stars as Isabelle "Izzy" Grossman, a 1980s yuppie, or at least a woman who has aims of being a yuppie, working in an independent bookstore in Manhattan's upper west side where she gets to meet a lot of literary types, the sort of people who would just know every Broadway type and what they're doing, something I mentioned when I blogged about Angels Over Broadway. In Izzy's case, she's got an interest in Dutch-born author Anton Maes (Jerone Krabbe).

But Izzy also has one foot in another world. She grew up on the Lower East Side, which in the 20th century was one of the centers of Jewish immigration to New York before the Hasidim made Brooklyn a much more dominant part of New York's Jewish demographic. Indeed, Izzy still has a grandmother, Bubbie (Reizl Bozyk), who lives down there; the two love each other even if most of their lives are spent in entirely difference cultures. One of the things that bugs Bubbie is that Izzy still hasn't gotten married.

So Bubbie brings in one of her friends, Hannah Mandelbaum (Sylvia Miles). Hannah is a marriage broker, but not quite like the one Thelma Ritter plays in The Model and the Marriage Broker. Instead, Hannah gives of vibes of being the sort of person who just knew everybody in the community and which families would be right for each other, and tries to influence the "right" people to get together. She's the sort of person you can imagine being in the villages like the one depicted in Fiddler on the Roof, or in the equivalent villages in other religious communities in the olden days.

But this time, Hannah introduces Izzy to Sam Posner (Peter Riegert). Sam is a secular Jew, just like Izzy. But he's still of the Lower East Side, and works as a pickle salesman, a decidedly non-yuppie profession. Izzy is horrified both at what she sees as meddling from her grandmother and Hannah, and the idea of going out with a pickle salesman.

But Sam is just so nice, such a mensch, that you know he and Izzy are going to wind up together in the final reel. The only problem is that the two are introduced a half hour in, and the movie has another hour to get to that point, so there are going to be more twists and turns along the way. Indeed, when Izzy isn't so certain about Sam, she decides that Sam would be perfect for another of her friends, except that the friend realizes right away how Izzy and Sam are really meant for each other.

In some ways, Crossing Delancey is a movie bound to its era and physical location. The characters are very much 1980s characters, as is this depiction of New York. You could see Woody Allen being right at home here, for example. But at the same time, the themes explored by Crossing Delancey are very much universal: tradition versus modernity, the desire for love and fulfillment, and so on. Reading other people's reviews of Crossing Delancey, I see that most of them have fond memories of it. It's easy to see why.