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 (Jacques Doniol-Valcroze).
When her lover (Jean-Claude Brialy) buys her a mink coat, the adulterous pair hatch a plan to avoid her husband's questioning the coat's origins.
[2][3] 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, the film is something of a curio thanks to a scene in which Rivette and New Wave contemporaries Claude Chabrol, Jean-Luc Godard, and François Truffaut are seen in the same room as party guests.