If you place Oscar Wilde’s Lady Windemere’s Fan into a blender with Evelyn Waugh and Sex in the City of Sorrento circa 1930, you’ll have an idea of what A Good Woman is all about. The questionable reputation of Mrs Erlynne (Helen Hunt) has outgrown New York. She escapes to Italy’s Amalfi coast and strikes up an agreeable relationship with Mr Windemere that sours his young marriage. The actions of this notorious gold-digger sets tongues wagging up and down the coast until events finally boil over and a desperate Mrs Windemere (Scarlett Johansson) seeks to run away with the caddish Lord Darlington. Will the intervention of Lord Augustus (Tom Wilkinson) redress the balance? Mike Barker directs a reasonably faithful reworking of Wilde’s play, albeit moved to Italy with Americans on centre stage. As expected, A Good Woman overflows with crisp wit, social arrogance and bon mots shifted up with a hint of trans-Atlantic envy: “Americans! They don’t shop, they pillage!”, bemoans a local noblewoman. Such characters provide a good deal of entertainment which is just as well since those under the spotlight are not so forthcoming. There is a lack of sharpness, of earnestness if you will, from those on whom the play turns. Hunt is too reasonable to really convince as a brazen jezebel, Johansson too sweet, Marc Umbers as Windemere too much of a poster boy. A Good Woman ultimately suffers from a lack of contrast that made Being Julia so thoroughly entertaining. Nonetheless, Wilkinson’s light touch saves the film at all the right moments: he and Hunt are splendid together. Besides, any story in which a bosomy matron asserts that “only plain girls cry, pretty girls go shopping” wins extra points. // COLIN FRASER