I have seen both versions of this film - the one starring Humphrey Bogart and Audrey Hepburn as well as this one - and I prefer this one.
The strongest performance in this film, in my opinion, is that of Julia Ormond. She is very capable of making the transition from ugly duckling to swan required of the title role, and she does so smashingly.
She plays Sabrina, a girl who has always had a crush on Greg Kinnear’s character. This crush was so severe - and her position in society so beneath that of Kinnear - that she is sent to France for several months to study photography.
Kinnear plays the womanizing younger brother of Harrison Ford’s character, and both boys and their father have been driven around for many years by Sabrina’s father, the family chauffeur. When Kinnear develops a problem in his gluteus maximus - slivers of glass caused by having sat on some champagne glasses he was taking to an outdoor court so that he could share a champagne toast with Sabrina (after she came back from France) - he asks Ford’s character to continue the process of wooing her. In the process, Ford falls in love with her, despite having admitted to being put up to wooing Sabrina by Kinnear’s character.
The problem is that this is a plot which might work better in a Bollywood film. Here in America, we pride ourselves on our egalitarianism, and besides, very few rich people have privately-funded chauffeurs anymore. Most chauffeurs in America work for the same companies as their CEO bosses, and are limited to driving the boss from point A to point B only if it is related to the CEO’s job (although that can be stretched to include getting the boss to and from work in the morning). Most of the rest tend to work for limousine companies which chauffeur brides and bridegrooms and prom parties around this time of year.
All in all, this is a nice piece of fluff to spend a couple of hours with.