Crossing Delancey: City Girl

Micklin Silver has a way of instantly setting an amiable mood; this is not a harsh New York City, but one suffused with possibility. And at the center of the affair, we find Izzy, in full hostess mode. The camera instantly zeroes in on Irving’s striking face—along with her comely mop of curly hair—letting the viewer know that this is the girl to watch. We see her performing a variety of feminine tasks: she leads an older woman through the throng, she subtly notices an attendee trying to shoplift a book and quietly removes the stolen goods from the thief’s bag, and she walks around the party collecting used glasses, even though the store has hired cater waiters. We see Izzy as a woman who wants to be essential here; she has big literary aspirations, and she is determined to be taken seriously. This can, of course, lead to others exploiting her eagerness. At the end of the party, Izzy finds herself drawn, as if by tractor beam, toward a floppy-haired author named Anton Maes (a perfectly smarmy Jeroen Krabbé), who she thinks is trying to flirt. In truth, he just wants somewhere to set down his wine. “So you won’t be out of a job,” he says, arrogantly, as he plops his trash on her tray.

In her uptown life, Izzy is desperate to be considered useful; in her other, downtown life, however, she has no choice but to be of use. Izzy is a devoted caretaker for her aging grandmother, also known as Bubbie Kantor (played by the legendary Yiddish-stage actress Reizl Bozyk), who lives alone on the Lower East Side, south of Delancey Street. Izzy’s parents have retired to Florida, leaving her to keep an eye on her bubbie, who despite her age is still a sprightly woman with a kooky sense of humor. When describing Izzy’s apartment, Bubbie says, “She lives alone in a room, like a dog. A dog should live alone, not people!” Early in the film, while Izzy is visiting Bubbie, she learns that her grandmother has colluded with a loudmouth matchmaker (a hilarious Sylvia Miles) to set her up with a local bachelor named Sam Posner (Peter Riegert), who owns a pickle stand. Izzy balks at this prospect from the get-go; she has no interest at all in the meddling dealings of a yenta. She asserts that she can find her own dates, thank you very much.

What Izzy doesn’t tell Bubbie is that she is also consumed by her crush on Anton Maes, who, despite being a complete jerk from the moment the film opens, holds a mysterious sway over her as a figure of erotic desire. Izzy sees Anton as an extension of the literary world she wants to enter, a kind of swaggering gateway figure who would allow her to gain a foothold in the uptown circles she so longs to join. Sam Posner, on the other hand, represents everything about the traditional world that Izzy is so keen to escape. And yet Izzy relents and agrees to meet him, and from the moment they first have lunch in Bubbie’s kitchen, their chemistry starts to crackle. Riegert plays Sam with an air of mannered courtliness, and you can see Izzy’s confusion at having encountered such an elegant person with such a pedestrian job. During their first meeting, Sam tells her a story about a man who seduced a woman by buying himself a new hat, and Izzy is charmed, somewhat despite herself. She is doubly charmed when, a few days later, she receives a felted fedora of her own from Sam. She walks around in the ostentatious hat not out of obligation but out of experimentation; she is trying Sam on, seeing if he fits.

The hat suits her, but still, Izzy resists Sam on principle. She simply doesn’t want to be the type of woman who would submit to such an antiquated dating system. She is a modern girl—she lives alone, she has sex, she drinks, she works out at the gym. At one point, though, Izzy sneaks downtown to get a look at Sam at work, to see if perhaps she has misjudged him. Her gaze softens as she watches Sam joke with two older men and offer them pickles; he is a kind man, one who respects his elders and keeps them fed. But Izzy’s stomach turns as she watches Sam reach into a barrel of pickled peppers and shove a briny handful into a mason jar. Micklin Silver is careful to make this action look as grotesque as possible—you can hear the slosh of pickle juice, see the slimy sheen of vinegar dripping off Sam’s hands. Izzy feels not desire but disgust—not necessarily for Sam, who is handsome and wholesome, but for all that she has tried to leave behind.

What makes Izzy and Sam’s ultimate union so satisfying is that Micklin Silver and the film’s writer, Susan Sandler (whose play of the same title formed the basis of the script), allow Izzy to work these tensions out for herself. They never judge her, as she slowly realizes what she really wants, nor do they let her off the hook for her bad behavior on her path to figuring out what she needs. She is rude to Sam and dismissive of his romantic gestures, she giggles cattily with her girlfriends at a friend’s bris, she tries to set Sam up with one of her friends, and, in a moment of terrible judgment, she ditches out on a date with Sam in order to rush to Anton’s apartment. In the end, Izzy rejects Anton’s arrogance and at last sees everything clearly; Sam—who, by the way, was bullied into using the yenta’s services as much as Izzy was—is not a wet blanket, but a solid, timeless quilt of a man, a cozy tapestry of the old and the new. Micklin Silver, to her credit, never loses sight of Sam’s dignity, even when Izzy cannot see it. He is never an easy punch line. At one point, for example, Izzy notices a lovely smell wafting around him, and he says that he soaks his hands in vanilla and milk to counteract the scent of brine. Sam is just as self-aware as Izzy is, just as attuned to little details, and this is ultimately what causes Izzy to fall for him. She may find pickles crass, but she finds his milky hands craveable.