A New York romantic comedy that's truly romantic and truly comic -- and truly New Yorkian for that matter. Can a pretty, early-thirties, somewhat starry-eyed bookstore manager (and personal organizer of "the most prestigious reading series in New York City") find happiness with a second-generation pickle vendor on the Lower East Side? Does such a woman need to find further happiness with this or indeed any man? She doesn't seem to think so. Her grandmother, "Bubbie," isn't buying it. Hence a Jewish marriage broker, and hence the pickle man. The movie does a number of very hard things very well. It defines, for a start, two distinct and widely separate social milieus -- the Upper West Side artsy-booksy world and what we might call The Old Neighborhood (and all that they stand for in terms of values inherited and values adopted) -- and it does so in such a way as to set up some specific, and real, and yet broadly symbolic, barriers to the course of romance. And although the woman (Amy Irving) is the one and only central character, and although the action is seen entirely from her point of view, and other characters -- not only the pickle man, but a Jerzy Kosinski-ish literary immigrant of some degree of glamour -- change and waver in her eyes, so does she change and waver in ours. She gets, for example, an occasional demerit for her mild condescension, and perhaps for her overpassive involvement with a tempestuously married man. And she gets several demerits per minute when, at the merest beck of the glamorous immigrant, she is willing to keep her suitor cooling his heels on an important date. By means of that sort of thing, the movie attains just about the degree of distance from its protagonist that we expect in something we could without embarrassment refer to as Art. And yet it still creates a great deal of concern and anxiety and rooting interest about the outcome. All this is well earned, not just taken for granted. With Peter Riegert and Jeroen Krabbé; written by Susan Sandler; directed by Joan Micklin Silver. (1988) — Duncan Shepherd
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