Carr-Wiggin’s approach is to rekindle the flame of the old Hollywood screwball comedies, only with a modern sensibility. The complications that ensue are funny and also tantalizingly romantic, but the filmmaker is after more. This is also the story of a woman who has settled into a boring life seeking to get out from under and find liberation. The ex-lover represents that to some extent, but when we see her near the end sitting down to do some of the writing she has always thought about, we know that her newly-found self esteem doesn’t depend on a man, whether she gets him or not.

The fun in the movie, apart from Stevenson’s delightful performance, lies in watching the oddball happenings. For example, Daniel Stern as Jack, the husband, who is a stick-in-the-mud enjoying jigsaw puzzles more than paying attention to his wife, amusingly becomes a different sort of guy when, reeling from his wife’s indiscretion, he meets the hot-looking, seductive Grace, embodied by attractive Valerie Mahaffey, and both performers make the most of the acting opportunity.

The mix-ups that occur in the plot are true to basics of the screwball genre. So are the iffy aspects of the feelings of a woman married for so long when she confronts the possibility of actually taking up with her ex-lover instead of merely fantasizing about him. Stevenson gets all of this right, and so does Karyo in his responses. One can point to a raft of improbabilities but realism is not what “A Previous Engagement” is about. As writer as well director, Carr-Wiggin has generated what she has to say by finding meaning in the entertainingly outrageous doings in a brief time period on Malta.