Le Coup du berger (1956, Jacques Rivette)
Le Coup du berger, or, “Fool’s Mate” or maybe “Checkmate”. Straub assisted-directed, Chabrol wrote, Truffaut and Godard had small parts.
A very Chabrollian short. A woman’s lover gives her a fur coat and she wants to keep it, but she’ll look suspicious to her husband. She they concoct a foolish plan: she pretends to find an airport claim check in a cab and has him pick up the case, where she’ll be pleasantly surprised to get a free fur coat! But he twists the plan by replacing the coat with something cheap and giving them good one to HIS lover. Gotcha!
A decent little flick… worth a look, but as Keith Uhlich in Slant says, it’s more Chabrol’s film than Rivette’s. He also says “the whole thing is shallow and obvious in ways that Rivette’s features never are”. I wouldn’t go that far, but I wasn’t assessing its worth in the Rivette canon, just watching for the fun of it.
