Old Yorker

  • Sabrina

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Billy Wilder (1954)

    In William Wyler’s Roman Holiday (1953), the film that deservedly made her a star and won her an Oscar, Audrey Hepburn was a princess temporarily disguised as a commoner.  Hepburn’s next picture is in a couple of ways more of the same.  Like Roman Holiday, Billy Wilder’s Sabrina is a romantic comedy (adapted, from Samuel Taylor’s recent stage play Sabrina Fair, by Wilder, Taylor and Ernest Lehman).  And the first part of the story requires Hepburn’s title character to be seen as just an ordinary girl – or, rather, because she’s ordinary, unseen.  Other people on the screen manage to ignore Sabrina without difficulty, though it’s not so easy for the film’s audience.

    Sabrina Fairchild and her widowed father Thomas (John Williams) live over not the shop but the garage, on the Long Island estate of a vastly rich business family, the Larrabees.  Thomas is their chauffeur and looks after the family’s eight cars.  Paterfamilias Oliver Larrabee (Walter Hampden) and his wife (Nella Walker) have two chalk-and-cheese sons.  Linus (Humphrey Bogart) is a workaholic for the Larrabee conglomerate and a bachelor.  David (William Holden) is an idle rich playboy, with three marriages already behind him.  Sabrina, brought up on the estate, has been in love with David for as long as she can remember.  To him, she’s part of the estate furniture.  During a big party at the Larrabee mansion, Sabrina watches David dance and smooch with giggly Gretchen van Horn (Joan Vohs), before he heads for the indoor tennis court with a bottle of champagne and ‘Isn’t It Romantic?’ playing in the background.  En route, he almost bumps into spectator Sabrina, smiles and says, as if correcting himself, ‘I thought I heard somebody’.  ‘No, it’s nobody,’ Sabrina murmurs sadly to herself as David goes off, calling out ‘Anyone for tennis?’ to Gretchen.

    To make matters worse, Sabrina is due to leave for Paris next morning, to learn cordon bleu cookery, and doesn’t want to go.  Back in the Fairchilds’ little apartment, she writes a suicide note to her father, then heads for the garage, shuts the doors and starts up all eight car engines.  She’s nearly unconscious from the fumes when Linus happens to arrive and rescues her.  Sabrina reluctantly accepts her fate and goes to Paris.  There, in the kitchens of a martinet culinary instructor (Marcel Hillaire), we see her try to crack an egg and fail to make a soufflé rise.  Two years later, she returns to Long Island, transformed into an elegant, sophisticated young woman, complete with Givenchy (via Edith Head) outfit and French poodle, whom she calls David.  When he catches sight of the grown-up Sabrina, the dog’s human namesake literally doesn’t recognise her; nor, once her son has driven Sabrina back to the estate, does David’s mother.  Within a matter of hours, at the Larrabees’ latest party, David is cheating on his new fiancée, Elizabeth Tyson (Martha Hyer), and all set to embark on the tennis court routine again, this time with Sabrina.  An accident involving champagne glasses stops David in his tracks, so Linus deputises.  His unsmiling face wasn’t the one Sabrina hoped to see but, as things turn out, Linus was once again in the right place at the right time …

    We understand that class prejudice blinded the Larrabees to the loveliness and artless charm of the chauffeur’s daughter pre-Paris – and that Audrey Hepburn’s unignorable beauty is crucial to making the situation funny.  But Sabrina isn’t as funny as it should be.  For a start, the social set-up is a bit puzzling.  Not only is Hepburn inarguably exquisite; John Williams as her father isn’t in the least servantly – he cuts a distinguished figure and is beautifully spoken.  (No trace of the tell-tale vowels that occasionally disturb the accent of another in-service Englishman abroad, the eponymous hero of Leo McCarey’s Ruggles of Red Gap.)  It’s true that Thomas Fairchild is introduced, in the film’s opening voiceover, as ‘imported from England years ago, together with a new Rolls-Royce … a fine chauffeur of considerable polish’, but his cut-above quality confuses things[1].

    Even though it doesn’t return, that opening voiceover, unmistakably Audrey Hepburn, heralds the film’s motto throughout:  the more of the leading lady, the better.  Hepburn reads in such carefully elocuted tones, making the prologue even longer than it already is, that she might already be Eliza Doolittle rehearsing for the embassy ball.  It’s testimony to her talent and charisma that you don’t get tired of watching and listening to Hepburn – whether she’s feeling sorry for herself, making a cockeyed attempt to end her life, playing comedy with each of her male co-stars, serious in later scenes with Humphrey Bogart, or singing (twice) ‘La vie en rose‘.  She’s always entertaining, often delightful; even so, you’re increasingly conscious that the people behind the film – maybe Paramount, to whom Hepburn was contracted at the time, as much as Billy Wilder – are overworking her appeal.  (They no doubt felt vindicated:  the result was a critical and commercial hit.)

    But Sabrina’s chief defects, major and minor, are in the script.  The minor ones consist of convenient omissions.  What did Thomas Fairchild make of receiving his adored daughter’s suicide note?  How did Sabrina spend her extracurricular time in Paris?  (She’s hardly seen there outside the cooking classes.  I wondered briefly if the other lessons she learns to acquire worldly poise were an instance of Production-Code code at work but evidently not.  Back on Long Island, Sabrina seems meant to be as pure as ever:  her only romance abroad has been with irresistible, life-enhancing Paris itself.)  The major problem is the weakly conceived character of David.  William Holden was Billy Wilder’s go-to actor of the early 1950s, appearing in two of the director’s previous three films, Sunset Boulevard (1950) and Stalag 17 (1953).  It’s understandable, after such successful collaborations, that the pair wanted another.  In Sabrina, Holden looks eager for action and ready to shine again, but, except for some nice bits of physical comedy, he’s wasted.  Until David comes good in the film’s last five minutes – which he does only as a plotting means to an end – he’s little more than an overprivileged jerk.

    This has consequences for more than Holden’s performance.  Humphrey Bogart, more surprisingly cast, is often touching as Linus; there are moments of real emotional connection between him and Audrey Hepburn.  But there’s no question as to which brother Sabrina will end up loving:  it’s obvious halfway through the story that she’ll realise she has grown up blinded to Linus by David’s dazzle, the elder brother as invisible to Sabrina as she once was to the younger brother.  The inevitability of a romcom’s outcome can, of course, be one of its chief charms, but that depends on the film’s creating a semblance of suspense – on the enjoyable agony of things going wrong between the made-for-each-other protagonists, before they finally come right.  That doesn’t happen in Sabrina.  Because there’s no substance to the brothers’ contest, Sabrina’s relationship with Linus feels too drawn out and the Hepburn-Bogart exchanges, well played as they are, pay diminishing returns.

    The permutations of romantic vs business alliances are worked out smoothly, though it’s a pity the denouement ignores Linus’ loyal secretary, Miss McCardle (excellent Ellen Corby).  The Larrabees are pursuing a merger with the Tyson family, who boast ‘the largest holdings in sugar cane in Puerto Rico’:  David tying the knot with Elizabeth Tyson will be a marriage of convenience in more ways than one.  When his younger brother turns his attention to Sabrina, Linus must intervene to ensure the twin mergers go ahead but subsequent events mean that both look doomed as a decisive boardroom meeting gets underway.  Sabrina, meanwhile, is setting sail for Paris:  she thought she’d be heading there with Linus but is travelling miserably alone.  David saves the day by announcing he’ll marry Elizabeth and arranging transport for Linus from the boardroom to Sabrina’s ship.  The Larrabees seal the business and matrimonial deals, while Linus exits the corporate world in favour of personal happiness.  Isn’t it romantic?  Not really because Sabrina itself is such blatantly transactional filmmaking.

    2 February 2026

    [1] According to Google AI overview, the chauffeur ‘is a cultured man through his refined demeanor, his intellectual interests, and his role as a source of wisdom for his daughter’.  An interesting piece by Jeremy Elice (at https://movielifelessons.substack.com/p/movie-life-lessons-sabrina-the-power) explains in greater detail that there’s lots more to Thomas Fairchild than meets the eye and ear.  I can’t believe I missed all this in Wilder’s film and wonder how much AI and Elice are referencing Sydney Pollack’s 1995 remake of Sabrina.

     

  • Nouvelle Vague

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Richard Linklater (2025)

    The second Richard Linklater film to open within the space of a few weeks (after Blue Moon), Nouvelle Vague is also the second cinema biography of Jean-Luc Godard in recent years.  Linklater’s film could hardly be more different from Michel Hazanavicius’s Redoubtable, aka Godard Mon Amour (2017).  Redoubtable was made by a Frenchman who clearly disliked Godard as a public figure and judged the French Swiss an overrated filmmaker.  Nouvelle Vague is the work of an American devotee, a grateful commemoration of Godard’s originality and influence.  The title suggests that Linklater is celebrating a cinema movement, rather than an individual.  He is to the extent that early scenes focus on the enthusiastic reception of François Truffaut’s The 400 Blows at Cannes in 1959 (where Truffaut was named Best Director); Nouvelle Vague’s closing shot is a freeze frame of Godard and Truffaut together, pals and partners.  There are brief references to their earlier careers, and Claude Chabrol’s, as critics for Cahiers du cinéma.  Over the course of Nouvelle Vague, other French New Wave luminaries are in plentiful evidence, however briefly.  But Linklater gives Godard the lion’s share of the action.  His film mainly dramatises the creation of Breathless.

    Nouvelle Vague is made by a knowledgeable cinema fan and made for other such fans.  Whenever a significant figure appears for the first time, Linklater puts their name on the screen.  A reasonably well-informed viewer will recognise the names of other New Wave filmmakers – Chabrol, Jacques Rivette, Éric Rohmer, Agnès Varda and her future husband Jacques Demy – and of illustrious figures from outside the movement who make cameo appearances in Nouvelle Vague (Robert Bresson, Jean Cocteau, Jean-Pierre Melville, Roberto Rossellini), but we mostly need the names to identify these people (all of them played by unfamiliar faces).  In many cases, their first appearance in Nouvelle Vague will be their only appearance, but announcing the names certifies each person’s contribution to what Linklater sees as a seminal time and place in cinema history.  What’s more, he names not just the auteurs but other key members of the Breathless crew – right through to a late scene of Godard in the cutting room, with his editors, Cécile Decugis and Lila Herman.  I kept wondering what a non-clued-up audience would make of Linklater’s well-intentioned name-dropping.

    This might give the impression that Nouvelle Vague is earnest, but it’s earnest in intention rather than execution.  Richard Linklater wasn’t born until the year in which Breathless appeared, yet his film has a nostalgic feel from the word go.  Like Breathless, it has black-and-white cinematography (by David Chambille).  The contemporary jazz on the soundtrack is designed to evoke the late 1950s setting and reflect Godard’s innovative, improvisational film-making approach.  The soundtrack features music by, among others, Count Basie and Quincy Jones, as well as Martial Solal, who wrote the music for Breathless.  With Godard (Guillaume Marbeck) his leading man, Linklater describes the recruitment of Jean Seberg (Zoey Deutch) and Jean-Paul Belmondo (Aubry Dullin) to play Patricia and Michel in Breathless; the writer-director’s interactions with Truffaut (Adrien Rouyard), Suzanne Schiffman (Jodie Ruth-Forest) and his assistant director, Pierre Rissient (Benjamin Cléry); and Godard’s disputes, including one physical fight, with his producer, Georges de Beauregard (Bruno Dreyfürst).  Breathless was shot in just twenty-three days during August and September 1959:  once filming is underway, Linklater presents a numbered day-to-day account of progress.  Cinematographer Raoul Coutard (Matthieu Penchinat) hunkers down inside a small postal cart moving along to capture the action on the Champs-Élysées.  After failing to persuade Truffaut to do a walk-on part as an informant who points out Belmondo’s Michel to the police, Godard himself does the walk-on.

    Linklater is recreating something momentous in cinema history, but he keeps things light, not to say lightweight.  That’s certainly a quality of his capable main actors, especially Aubry Dullin – who conveys Belmondo’s game-for-anything geniality but has little of his complex, powerful screen presence.  It’s only in occasional shots, where Dullin’s in shades and shown in profile, that he suggests the original.  Guillaume Marbeck, needless to say, wears the main man’s trademark sunglasses throughout, and does a good job of playing Godard, but Zoey Deutch is the best of the three principals – persuasive both as Jean Seberg and as Seberg’s Patricia in the film-within-a-film sequences.  Nouvelle Vague has been particularly well received in France (ten César nominations).  This may partly be because the film’s dramatis personae are better known in France than in the English-speaking world.  It probably also matters that the actors in larger roles are passable reincarnations of the people they’re playing yet not so dazzling as to obscure memories of French cultural icons.  

    Godard’s enthusiasm for certain Hollywood types, tropes and screen legends, which was integral to Breathless, and Linklater’s admiration for Godard and the French New Wave, lend Nouvelle Vague an appealing Franco-American complementarity.  (Holly Gent and Vincent Palmo, who’ve worked with Linklater several times previously, including as co-scenarists on Me and Orson Welles (2008), wrote the screenplay in English; Michèle Halberstadt and Laetitia Masson then adapted it into French.)  You come out with the feeling that Linklater has made the film he wanted to make, and you like him for making it.  You also like him more than you do his protagonist.  That Guillaume Marbeck’s Godard  is much less objectionable than Louis Garrel’s version in Redoubtable, owes something to Linklater’s respectful affection, leavened with a sense of humour that Godard apparently lacked.  In Nouvelle Vague, he’s forever spouting his own epigrams or quoting the aphorisms of elder statesmen of cinema and other art forms.  He always knows he’s right, is nearly always intolerant of colleagues’ suggestions, and especially exasperates members of the Breathless cast and crew used to more conventional, less impromptu ways of working.  Although Nouvelle Vague is nice to watch, Godard is sometimes such a pain you need to keep reminding yourself that his ends justified his means.  His abrasive, unyielding self-confidence in making Breathless delivered a brilliant film.

    29 January 2026

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