Fool's Mate (1956 film)

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.^[2][3][4]

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.^[2]