Le Coup du berger (1956, Jacques Rivette)

Le Coup du berger, or, Fool’s Mate or maybe Checkmate, with an all-star new wave crew. Rivette directed and narrated, Straub assistant-directed, Chabrol wrote, Truffaut and Godard had cameos, and Cahiers cofounder Jacques Doniol-Valcroze played the husband.

A woman’s lover (Brialy, he of the luxurious hair in Claire’s Knee) 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.

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