Making a match between two different worlds By Carrie Rickey Inquirer Movie Critic Think of Crossing Delancey as Moonstruck with a Yiddish accent. Also think of this winning romantic comedy as director Joan Micklin Silver's companion piece to her own Hester Street, likewise a film about a woman juggling the priorities of love and work in a new land. In the case of Crossing Delancey, the old country is the Lower East Side and the new world is Uptown, where Izzy Grossman (Amy Irving) runs a bookstore, a wood-paneled lair for literary lions. Depending on how you measure such things, her bookshop is one mile or a million light-years from the Lower East Side ethnic neighborhood where merchants haggle over the price of a fedora or a kosher dill. Izzy knows the old neighborhood well; she visits her bubbe (Reizl Bozyk) weekly. But you sense that for the 30ish beauty, the briny herring stalls and crowded wholesale outlets are a source of cultural embarrassment rather than pride. Little wonder that when her grandma hires a matchmaker to find Izzy a downtown mate - a pickle salesman - the young woman hails CROSSING DELANCEY *** Produced by Michael Nozik; directed by Joan Micklin Silver; written by Susan Sandler, based on her play; photography by Theo Van de Sande; music by Paul Chihara; distributed by Warner Bros. Running time: 1 hour, 37 mins. Izzy Grossman........ ..Amy Irving Sam Posner.........................Peter Riegert Bubbe Kantor Reizl Bozyk Anton Maes Jeroen Krabbe Marilyn Cohen................... Suzzy Roche Parent's guide: PG (romantic themes) Showing at: Ritz Five. -MOVIE REVIEW the fastest taxi uptown. Silver establishes the contrasting moods of Izzy's two worlds, the librarylike hush of the bookshop versus the rowdy chorus of the Lower East Side streets. Just as subtly we see Izzy as someone who thinks she is socially amphibious but who in fact has great difficulty navigating the two milieus. The film's atmosphere couldn't be improved upon, so sharply does it define Izzy's conflict. Where there is room for improvement is in Susan try that evolves from foggy to steamy. With her kittenish purr and lioness mane, feline Amy Irving is delightful as the dizzy Isabelle who sometimes confuses girlish fancy for womanly ideal not to mention downtown for downscale. Even better is Peter Riegert as Sam Posner, the pickle man. Vulpine Riegert, a terrific underplayer in such films as Local Hero and Animal House, is a phenomenon. It's in Riegert's careful modulations of tone, his knack for making understatements emphatic, that he gives dignity and intelligence to Sam, a character who Izzy worries isn't dignified or smart enough. Other supporting roles are memorably cast, particularly singer Suzzy Roche as Izzy's self-deprecating friend Marilyn who prefers watching the Mets to going out with men. As for Reizl Bozyk in what could be called the Olympia Dukakis role, this Yiddish theater figure making her movie debut is a little - or shall we say a lot? - actressy for this intimate film. One wishes Silver had told her that it's not kosher to ham it up in a Jewish movie. Peter Riegert is Lower East Side and Amy Irving is Uptown. play). There is the problem of shapelessness - is this a film about being single versus being married or is it about the inappropriate lover versus the appropriate man? And then there is the bigger problem of pasteboard characters, which means Sil- ver and her actors have to work overtime to give the script dimension. (Curiously, Moonstruck had the opposite problem: a great script but innocuous direction.) Fortunately, Silver cast the perfect actors and they have a chemis-