"Experience is the name everyone gives to their mistakes."

It may have been a mistake to update Oscar Wilde’s Lady Windermere’s Fan, moving the action from Victorian England to Italy of the 1930s. But it's an interesting choice, to modernise Wilde like this, and in some ways ups the ante for all the female characters in ways that wouldn’t have been possible in the fusty parlours of its original setting. In any case, experience beats untouched purity any day.

Mrs. Erlynne (Helen Hunt) has retreated to the lovely environment of Amalfi, Italy, searching for her next opportunity after being run out of New York society. Mrs. Erlynne and the Windermeres, a pair of seemingly devoted newlyweds, have become Americans here, which, along with the Italian locale, lends a layer of Jamesian morality to the events: the Old World and the New, pitted against each other. Interesting! But if it’s Wilde you’re looking for, you’ll be pretty ticked off.

The essence of the story remains. Erlynne seems to have set her sights on the young Mr. Windermere (Mark Umbers), much to the delight of the idle gossips, and of Lord Darlington (Stephen Campbell Moore), who himself has an eye on Mrs. Windermere (Scarlett Johansson). The gossips, it’s best to note, are mainly Lords and Ladies–Brits–"But scandal is just gossip made tedious by morality," they languidly declare, yet it is exactly morality that A Good Woman concerns itself with. Doesn’t the title tip you off?

And while brimming with Wilde’s witticisms, the script takes modern liberties with those oft-quoted quips–the original line like, "Tears are the refuge of plain girls, and the ruin of pretty ones" is given a go-girl lift with a new conclusion: "Pretty girls go shopping!"

But it’s not always as dunderheaded as all that. Take, for example, Erlynne’s room-of-one’s own speech against marriage, matching step for step the men’s misogynist dismissals of wives as necessary evils–"A man can be perfectly happy with one woman, as long as he doesn’t love her," and so on. Somehow her insistence on living the way she does, in spite of the consequences, is more relevant than ever during the opt-out revolution debates that place husband and family at immediate odds with a woman’s career, and more importantly, her self-determination. Even today, a woman’s liberty comes at a cost. Sometimes it’s worth the price. Quite the debate, for such a sentimentalized Oscar Wilde ripoff!

That’s what A Good Woman has going for it. It isn’t Oscar Wilde–not even close–but it definitely draws you in with its pretty packaging and those famous quips. Unfortunately, it has to overcome Helen Hunt’s relentless cheerfulness, making her an unlikely candidate for a damaged woman with a past. But her match, in Tom Wilkinson’s wearied Lord Augustus, more than makes up for Hunt. He reminds us, in the midst of fetishising Johansson’s youth, that experience is far less tedious than the self-delusion of American virtue.