Revamping an Audrey Hepburn romantic comedy borders on the sacrilegious, and can be deadly for your career. (Remember Julia Ormond? In 1995's Sabrina? Exactly.) But director Billy Wilder's schmaltzy 1957 soufflé of a film — about a naive Parisian cellist (Hepburn) feigning worldliness to seduce an aging American playboy (a miscast Gary Cooper) — lacks the oomph and sly visual wit you'd expect in a self-declared homage to Ernst Lubitsch (To Be or Not to Be). Though Wilder and co-writer I.A.L. Diamond are also responsible for 1960's gem The Apartment, Love is overly long and lacking in the zinger department — nothing a modern infusion of sharp rewriting and star power (say, the gamine-like Natalie Portman) couldn't fix. Plus, who wouldn't pay to see, say, Pierce Brosnan play a businessman slick enough to keep a quartet of violin-playing Gypsies on speed dial?
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