Fool's Mate (1956)

Original title

Le Coup du berger

Directed by

Jacques Rivette

Genre

comedy film

Country

France

Runtime

27 min

Rating

6.6 of 10 from 33 voters

Elsewhere

IMDb

How it feels

A wife cheats on her husband and claims to visit her sister. She and her lover try to hide the source of a new fur coat using a fake lost suitcase. The husband turns the tables on her.

amusingcleverlight-heartedironicplayfulbriskwry

What happens

Fool's Mate (French: Le Coup du berger) is a 1956 short film directed by Jacques Rivette. It stars Virginie Vitry as a wife cheating on her husband Jean, telling him she is visiting her sister Solange but spending the time with her lover Claude. When Claude buys her a mink coat, the adulterous pair hatch a plan to avoid her husband's questioning the coat's origins by leaving it in a suitcase at a train station and having him retrieve it after she pretends to find the claim check in a taxi. However, when he brings it home it contains a cheap rabbit-fur coat, and when Solange turns up wearing the mink at a party that night she realizes her husband has checkmated her. Fool's Mate is considered by some to be the first film of the French New Wave, or the movement's earliest antecedent. Released in 1956, it is something of a curio thanks to a scene in which Rivette and his New Wave contemporaries Claude Chabrol, Jean-Luc Godard, and François Truffaut are seen in the same room as party guests. (from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA)

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