Lady Windermere's Fan

One is chez Oscar Wilde, an early influencer who, Burton reminds us, started a rage for wearing carnations dyed green, possibly to drum up publicity for his play “Lady Windermere’s Fan,” but perhaps for no reason at all.

You remember Oscar Wilde’s aphorism from “Lady Windermere’s Fan”: The cynic knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.

Not merely a writer, though, Wilde was also a celebrity, notorious for his outrageous after-dinner epigrams and paradoxes, such as these quips from his unsettling comedy, “Lady Windermere’s Fan”: “I can resist everything except temptation”; “In this world there are only two tragedies: One is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it.”

The words, unattributed in the film and the source of its title, come from “Lady Windermere’s Fan” by Oscar Wilde, where they supply the definition of a cynic.

In an astonishing burst of productivity in the early 1890s, he wrote the blockbuster comedic plays “Lady Windermere’s Fan,” “A Woman of No Importance,” “An Ideal Husband” and “The Importance of Being Earnest.”