Crossing Delancey

Now that I have Turner Classic Movies back in my life (don't ask me how), I had the pleasure of watching their late Saturday night movie - late Sunday morning for me - Crossing Delancey (1988). I had fond memories of the first time I watched it thirty years ago. I don't remember where I was when I saw it, though I was probably in Nevada on my first tour of duty in the Navy.

Crossing Delancey is billed as a romantic comedy, but it's thin on both. Immediately on being reminded that the film's leading character works at New York's "last privately-owned bookstore", I thought of You've Got Mail and what a relief it is to be deprived of Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks. Instead we have Amy Irving and Peter Riegert, and instead of a plot stolen from Lubitsch's Shop Around the Corner, Crossing Delancey was adapted by Susan Sandler from her own play.

Isabelle works at the aforementioned bookstore, which is where she feels she belongs, among bohemian types, like a Dutch author, played by Jeroen Krabbé, whose marriage is complicated enough for him to show interest in Isabelle. He recites to her lines from the Chinese Book of Songs:

Ripe plums are falling
now there are only five
may a fine lover come for me
while there is still time

Ripe plums are falling
now there are only three
may a fine lover come for me
while there is still time

Ripe plums are falling
i gather them in a shallow basket
may a fine lover come for me
tell me his name

The Dutchman is only interested in Isabelle's plums, but she's oblivious of just how manipulative and smarmy he is. Meanwhile, Isabelle's grandmother, Ida, whom Isabelle calls her Bubbie (the Yiddish word Bubbe, or grandmother), has enlisted a matchmaker, a real horror played by Sylvia Miles, to find a nice Jewish boy for her. The matchmaker comes up with Sam (Peter Riegert) who inherited a pickle store from his father. He's down-to-earth and prosaic, and has been - unbeknownst to her - interested in Isabelle for awhile. According to the rules of romantic comedy, there's supposed to be some suspense involved about which man Isabelle will choose - although the plot has more to do with which life she will choose: a life of the mind, the arts (which Micklin Silver portrays as pretentious posturing) or a life in the real world of pickles, living up to the expectations of her Jewish family. Lost somewhere in the shuffle is Isabelle living a life of her own instead of the one outfitted for her by her Bubbie. There is no real conflict, however, as the Dutch writer is exposed as an ass (in one scene, Rosemary Harris tells him to go back to the Netherlands to his own language - sage advice) and Sam shows Isabelle what a fine dancer (and kisser) her is. 

What makes the formulaic bearable in this case are the actors. I will single out the two leads, Irving and Riegert, and one more - Reizl Bozyk as Bubbie. For an all-too-short time, Amy Irving was the darling of American film. She married the Brazilian filmmaker Hector Babenco (divorced 2005), who gave her the lead in his beautiful film Bossa Nova (2000). She gives a fine performance in Crossing Delancey as a big girl lost. By now it's hard to believe that Peter Riegert was a pledge in the Animal House (1979) fraternity. He made a much bigger - and memorable - splash in Bill Forsyth's Local Hero (1983). In Crossing Delancey he does a nice turn as a Jewish New Yorker. In fact, it's the parochial (if that is the word) Jewish world in which Crossing Delancey is solidly situated that gives it a flavor that is strong, if not exactly distinct. It's Reizl Bozyk, a longtime actor in the Yiddish theater, playing Bubbie, her first film role, that adds a ring of truth to an otherwise predictable story.

Some elements of the production seem too imposing, like the almost incessant music, supplied mostly by The Roches (Suzzy Roche plays Isabelle's friend Marilyn) and the otherwise distinguished American composer Paul Chihara. (Though I was puzzled by a late piano solo in the film that borrows considerably from Dave Grusin's theme from On Golden Pond.) But the shots of 1980s Manhattan supplied by Theo Van de Sande, including a handball game in real Manhattan afternoon sunlight, were nicely done, along with the clothes and the hair all now redolent of the time. There's a scene in a crowded deli in which Run DMC blasts from a boom box, only to be interrupted by an old woman in stage makeup who comes into the deli off the street and launches into "Some Enchanted Evening" to the now dumbstruck crowd, including Isabelle, closing with the lines,

Some enchanted evening, when you find your true love,
When you hear him call you across a crowded room,
Then fly to his side and make him your own,
Or all through your life you may dream all alone.
Once you have found him, never let him go,
Once you have found him, never let him go.

Joan Micklin Silver had an uneven career. I still like her 1979 film, Chilly Scenes of Winter, with Mary Beth Hurt and the late John Heard (and Peter Riegert). Without having seen it in almost forty years, it lingers pleasantly in my memory of when I was in college in my early twenties. How splendid that so many of the people I have mentioned in this review, Irving, Riegert, Silver, the Roches, are still around and still "active."