There is a kind of film that mistakes volume for seriousness — that believes the way to indict male violence is to stage it, loudly, and dare you to look away. Tommaso Usberti has made almost the opposite. ‘Before the War,’ the Italian-French director’s first feature, keeps the promise of its title: it lives in the before, in the ordinary weather of a provincial town where a young man learns that respect is something you win with your fists. That the jury of Venice’s International Critics’ Week has handed it the section’s top prize reads less as a surprise than as a correction — restraint rewarded over spectacle.

Usberti’s route to that stage is its own quiet argument for the patient film. Italian by origin and Parisian by adoption, he arrived at the Lido not as a wunderkind but as a filmmaker who has been circling this material for the better part of a decade. His short ‘Deux égarés sont morts’ took a Cinéfondation prize at Cannes; a residency in Paris followed; and only now does he plant a full-length flag. The patience shows. This is not a debut that announces itself — it accumulates.

The story belongs to Guido, played by Piero Usberti: a man in his early twenties who has made himself legible to his peers the only way the racist, macho climate around him seems to reward — through violence. Then he meets Sonia, a Kosovar immigrant played by Luàna Bajrami, of ‘Portrait of a Lady on Fire,’ and the grammar of his world begins to fail him. Usberti’s smartest decision is to refuse the redemption arc’s usual shape. Sonia is not a lesson and the encounter is not a cure; what the film tracks is subtler — the moment a learned language stops fitting the mouth that speaks it.

It would be easy to file this under the season’s crowded shelf of ‘toxic masculinity’ dramas, the ones that turn up at a festival pre-approved by their subject matter. ‘Before the War’ earns its place by being interested in cause rather than symptom — in the apprenticeship, the pack, the code a boy inherits before anyone offers him a reason to question it. The war of the title is not a battlefield. It is what a certain kind of manhood is always, quietly, preparing for.

The Critics’ Week, Venice’s parallel showcase for debut features, set Usberti against six other first works — from Colombia, Tunisia, Brazil, India and China — and singled his out. A France-Italy co-production shot in Italian and Albanian, running a lean seventy-six minutes, it now carries the one credential a young director’s calling card cannot buy: a Venice prize with his name on it. The section’s IWONDERFULL Grand Prize comes with a modest cheque, enough for a good dinner on the Lido and little more.

But the sentence that cheque buys — first feature, top prize, Venice — is the only line that will travel with Guido’s face onto every poster from here. For a filmmaker who spent years learning to wait, it is a strangely fitting reward: the payoff, at last, for everything that came before.

Tags: Italian cinema, Before the War, Luàna Bajrami, Tommaso Usberti, Venice Critics’ Week