SABRINA
The plot: Sad-sack chaffeur's daughter Sabrina Fairchild (Audrey Hepburn), returns from Paris newly radiant and refined, ready to woo silky-smooth rich boy David Larrabee (William Holden). Both fate and David's brother Linus (Bogie) have other plans.
It's not unusual for critics and everyday connoisseurs alike to label this one "the ultimate cinematic Cinderella story". That's mighty praise, but not mighty enough. Sabrina, one of the most enchanting romance films ever made, does the Mrs. Wuss-With-The-Pumpkin Carriage one better. If it hasn't wooed you to the nth degree by the end of the opening monologue, you're romantically impotent and should probably burn your DVD collection and join the monastery. The first time I saw the picture was on a faulty TV that dyed the black-and-white visuals a strange shade of light pink (weird, considering "life in pink" is the translated title of a Piaf song that Sabrina sings), and that color scheme seemed appropriate for a film that basically functions as one protracted, swooning sigh of giddy, girlish delight. I mean that in the best way possible.
Credit director Billy Wilder for turning a wafer-thin bonbon of a plot into something that seriously sticks. If there's one skill the man had in spades, it was the rare and incalculably valuable ability to make absolute absurdity look like the natural order of things. Characters in his films hold elaborate funerals for pet chimps, cross-dress to escape from gangsters, and sustain serious injuries from sitting on empty champagne glasses. But his pseudo-obsessive control of every variable from camera angles to music volume makes these moments scary, hysterical, touching, thrillingly alive. What they never are is fake. In both this picture and his other masterpiece,Sunset Boulevard, he discovered a clever way of both acknowledging and avoiding reality. For the majority of both movies, he placed his main characters in a mansion, enshrouded in luxury yet walled off from commonality. Out there in the Wide World, folks go about their business just as we do, but inside the Desmond pleasure palace, or, in this case, the Larrabee manor, people act differently. Notice how just about every nutty action in the film is undertaken by someone from that house, which is more like a world of its own, both literally (it has two swimming pools, twotennis courts) and figuratively.
If Wilder makes the universe convincing, the luminous A-Hep authenticates the actions of its inhabitants. After all, for the entire first half of the film, until her "bonjour, Paris!" makeover (one of many in her career), we're supposed to believe that no one in the Larrabee household is really attracted to Sabrina. Think about it. We're actually being asked to believe that no one finds Audrey fucking Hepburn physically attractive! The good news is, Audrey's aware that, no matter the frumpiness factor of the garbs she dons, she will never ever look ugly. Still, for the sake of the character, she manages to make Sabrina unattractive in another way. Look at her eyes pre-Paris. She comes off like a puppy being kicked over and over and over. Every line is rank with self-pity. We see how her confidence in herself is so low no one could ever be confident enough in her to get a real relationship going. When she gets back from France, her clothes and hair and makeup are all more alluring, but what's really changed is her opinion of herself. She knows she's beautiful, and that knowledge makes her attractive. Audrey's acting choices sell the entire love story. This is why people who claim her brains didn't match her beauty should be promptly sterilized.
Now back to my first comments. What makes this better even than good ol' Cinderelly? In that fairy tale, you're left with the impression that her reward for her beauty is a prince. Look like the boy wants you to, and you'll get him. It's basically a medieval take on Grease. In Sabrina, Hepburn's reward isn't a debonair cina-dude (though do you really doubt she'll get one in a film like this?), but a better understanding of herself. Even if she doesn't initially wind up with a great guy, she now knows she's worthy of one.
The Singular Scene: Watch how Sabrina attempts suicide and marvel at how Wilder makes it funny and wrenching and wondrous all at once.
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