Romantic comedies have always served as a kind of fantasy. While falling in love is a near-universal experience, watching beautiful people in luxe settings argue, stammer, fail to communicate, and somehow fall in love anyway can feel a bit disconnected from the reality most people experience. Even the rom-coms that seem to be set in a world like ours feel like fantastic upscale versions of where we live.
A little fantasy is great, but sometimes being reminded of the fairy tales happening around you is fun as well. Joan Micklin Silver’s 1988 film Crossing Delancey takes a story that wouldn’t be out of place in one of the bigger budgeted rom-coms of the era and tells it in a way that looks somewhat closer to what its audience might have experienced.
Izzy Grossman (Amy Irving) works as a publicist at a bookstore on the Upper West Side. Apart from having a crush on the roguish poet Anton Maes (Jerome Krabbe), she’s satisfied with her life as a single career woman. Wanting something greater than mere satisfaction for her granddaughter, Bubbie Kantor (Reizl Bozick) works with matchmaker Hannah Mandelbaum (Sylvia Miles) to set Izzy up on a date with Sam Posner (Peter Riegert), a pickle store owner who’s carrying a torch for her. Frustrated with this old-world setup, Izzy resists Sam’s courtship, only to realize how well-matched he is to her.
Fans of contemporary rom-coms would be forgiven for thinking Manhattan begins and ends with the Upper West Side. While Izzy lives in that fabled neighborhood, she frequently travels to the Lower East Side to visit her elderly grandmother. The Lower East Side is historically a Jewish neighborhood, and Izzy’s visits show her tenuous connection to her Jewish heritage. Micklin Silver shoots Izzy’s visits in a loose, almost verite style; the shots are frequently at eye level, so we can take in what she’s seeing, and include details that some filmmakers would depict as exotic—like signs in Hebrew or a pair of Hasidic teenagers with long tendrils—in a matter-of-fact way.
The difference in the neighborhoods where Izzy and Sam live reflects the contrast in their worldviews. While Izzy works behind the scenes as a publicist for New Day Books, Sam is a more visible part of the larger community at the pickle store he inherited from his father. She seems to be agnostic, where Sam attends services at the neighborhood synagogue every morning.
You can also see the contrast between the characters in the ways they communicate. Izzy works and lives among people who wear their intelligence and impressive vocabularies like designer clothing, but she looks around the rooms she’s in and speaks slowly and carefully when it’s her turn to speak. (You can feel Irving weighing each syllable as she says her lines.) Sam has a more direct communication style, speaking in dense paragraphs and casually throwing off personal anecdotes and allusions to Judaism that serve as a metaphor for things he may not be ready to say out loud. To Riegert’s credit, his matter-of-fact line readings and subtle facial expressions make his dialogue sound more natural.
Under the contrasting communication styles, Izzy and Sam have a lot to say to one another. As Sam leaves Bubbe’s apartment after their first date, he tells her an anecdote about how a friend of his became engaged after he replaced his old felt cap with a “gray felt Stetson.” It sounds like a short story someone might have read at a get-together at New Day Books. Before Izzy turns Sam down for a date, her jaw unclenches and her eyes soften. You can see her responding to Sam’s words, knowing there might be more for them than she initially thought.
In a contemporaneous review of Crossing Delancey, critic Roger Ebert complained that the film “makes the mistake of creating characters who are interesting enough to make us care for them – and then denying them freedom of speech.” What Micklin Silver and screenwriter Susan Sandler did with the film contradicts this criticism. They establish that Sam and Izzy don’t know how to communicate with one another at first, and that they adjust to one another’s ways of speaking to say the things they need to say to one another. This process of learning one another’s language and how that can lead to love is one that happens to a lot of people, and watching that process is frustrating and ultimately rewarding.
Crossing Delancey came out between the releases of the blockbuster comedies Baby Boom and When Harry Met Sally, both of which featured young professional women finding love in and around a fantasy version of New York. While Crossing Delancey was not an instant classic like the other titles, its cozier variation on the romantic comedy genre is just as satisfying as the films that came out around the same time, and it deserves a wider audience. 
“Crossing Delancey” is available for digital rental and purchase.
