In "The Grass Is Greener" Stanley Donen plays around with love

It is up to discreet geniuses to create works that transcend them. In Stanley Donen's work, there is both the forest and the tree, the medal and its reverse. The fact that he was one of the most gifted artisans of the Hollywood musical ( Singin' in the Rain , One Day in New York , Funny Face ) sometimes tends to obscure the fact that he was also the inspired author of spirited and caustic thrillers, vying with each other in formal inventions ( Charade , Arabesque ), and bittersweet romcoms ( Indiscreet , A Journey for Two ), whose acid elegance allows the melancholy and the bites of time that threaten hearts to surface.

Belonging to this second vein, all in half-tones and minor chords under the guise of a charming vaudeville whose conventions he strives to tear to shreds, The Grass Is Greener on the Other Side (1960), a little-known and underestimated film to which the publisher Rimini offers a beautiful Blu-ray box, bears witness to this period of his career when, freed from the Hollywood studios and now settled in the effervescent England of the Swinging Sixties, Donen moved away from the musical and the exultation of bodies, to shake himself off in sophisticated comedies more centered on conversation, making