When David becomes engaged to Elizabeth Tyson (Lauren Holly), the daughter of the man who owns the flat panels, Linus couldn't be more pleased. Their families will merge personally and professionally. But then Sabrina returns from Paris, David is so entranced by her that he forgets Elizabeth, and Linus sees that it is up to him to sidetrack David's dangerous obsession by seducing Sabrina himself.
It is here, having dispatched with the Cinderella and Duckling plot lines, that we venture into Freudianism. Linus is old enough, by my calculations, to be Sabrina's grandfather, although in movies such considerations do not apply (and nobody thought about Bogart's toupee and cigarette breath during his love scenes with Hepburn). In falling in love with him, Sabrina in some sense is choosing a father figure - transferring her love, perhaps, from her own father (John Wood), a British subject who chose to be a chauffeur because it would leave him a lot of time to read.
To get Sabrina away from David, Linus asks her to join him on a trip to Martha's Vineyard, allegedly to take some photos of a cottage the family is thinking of selling. Only a pure innocent could confuse Linus' behavior there (bicycle rides, sailing, a picnic and a fire on the beach) with a photo opportunity, and inevitably Sabrina falls in love, although not, of course, without plenty of difficulties and misunderstandings in the third act.
To call "Sabrina" escapism is an understatement. It is escapism about escapism: Sabrina is escaping into this movie world as much as we are. And Pollack is not shy about the fairy-tale aspect; when Sabrina perches in her tree in an early scene, spying on her beloved David, the movie asks us to believe that she could overhear his small talk on the dance floor, and we do.
When the movie asks us to believe Sabrina doesn't know Linus is seducing her, and when it wants us to believe Linus doesn't know he's falling in love, we go along. There is a voice of sanity in the plot, in the form of Linus and David's mother (Nancy Marchand as a crusty dowager), but it is there only to slow down the headlong rush to love.
It's said they don't make movies like "Sabrina" anymore. This 1995 version shows that they do, occasionally. Arriving in the same season as "The American President," it suggests that perhaps, having at last given us one sexy slasher too many, Hollywood is prepared to reconsider the possibilities of romance.
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