26/03/2024 - The Swiss actor discusses his fourth directorial effort, screened at Bari’s Bif&st, which takes us back to the golden age of duels, in a world going through profound changes

(© Bif&st)

Vincent Perez is certainly no stranger to combat in front of the camera, be it sword fighting, fencing or brandishing a sabre (see On Guard, Queen Margot and Fanfan la tulipe [+see also:
trailer
film profile], for example). Now, the Swiss actor has dedicated his fourth directorial feature, Edge of the Blade [+see also:
film review
interview: Vincent Perez
film profile], to the very topic of duelling. We talked to him about his movie, in which he also stars, at Bari’s Bif&st, where it was screened as one of the international premieres.

Cineuropa: How do you think this story about honour and reputation resonates today?
Vincent Perez: I think there are a lot of different layers in the story. The first one, which is the hardest to discern, is the fact there’s a world on the verge of a new era. The same thing is happening now in our world, and everybody's a bit nervous about it because of the wars and the artificial intelligence… Now, imagine yourself in that time, at the end of the 19th century, in France. Suddenly, people were talking about electricity and were very nervous about it – the rumour was that if you looked too long at an electric light bulb, you would go blind. Then there was one’s reputation: losing your reputation is something that today, with social media, could be devastating because it's so huge. At that time, it was possible to stop your reputation from being tarnished: you send your witnesses, in 48 hours you organise a duel, someone will lose, and the offence is neutralised.

The end of the 19th century was also when freedom of the press was established. Everyone could say what they wanted, and demands for reparations multiplied.
Duels already existed before, but they gained traction coinciding with the end of censorship in 1881. My film is set in 1887, the golden age of fighting. There was one duel per day and one death for every 35 duels. Of these, half of the duellists belonged to the press or literary worlds.

Many of the characters in your film really existed. What kind of research did you do?
The movie was very much based on things that Adolphe Eugène Tavernier [who, in the film, is the manager of the fencing room, played by Guillaume Gallienne] wrote in his book L’art du duel, written in 1886: he was like the intellectual of the fencing world. The fact that the great newspapers had their own fencing rooms to train their journalists in duelling techniques was actually true. Ferdinand Massat [Damien Bonnard] also existed. He regularly dragged Marie-Rose Astié de Valsayre [Doria Tillier] through the mud. And she really existed, too: a modern thinking woman who defends her honour, even with the sword. The swordmaster [Roschdy Zem] is the character that is the most “invented”, but I had so many examples to draw from: every time I saw drawings from that time, in those fencing rooms, there was always someone with a link to Arab countries. The only thing that I invented was the fight between Massat and Astié. She did everything she could for this to happen, but he never accepted, so the film is a way of offering her this fight that she always wanted to have.

The romance between Astié and the swordmaster is also invented, one assumes…
The link between all of the characters is the connection with the Franco-Prussian war, the humiliating defeat, and they're all reconstructing themselves. So, there's a romance, but it seems like it's more about two people who are kindred spirits – two lost souls. She lost her husband, and she's into those personal fights. She wants to place women in a different position in society, but in this man's world [at that time], it was just impossible. Women didn't have the right to vote then. In the movie, she's the future. My character, colonel Berchère, the bad guy, who also existed, is very much the past. And the only one who can move towards a new world in the movie is the swordmaster: because of this relationship with her, he's going to be able to change.

This was your first time acting in a film that you directed. How was it?
It was interesting to be part of the film as an actor. Usually, directors feel excluded from the rest of the cast, but being part of it, I understood from the inside, even if only through the make-up, what my actors felt. The most difficult scene was the one with the horse: you have to direct a film, on a horse, with a sword in your hand. That scene was quite challenging. But it works really well, and we did it in three days, which is really short.