For most of a long career, Monica Bellucci has been filmed as an image before she was ever watched as an actor — a face the camera adored, sometimes at the expense of the woman standing inside it. The prize she carries away from Locarno reverses that order, and it is worth pausing on why.

She won the festival’s Best Performance award, the main competition’s top acting honor and now handed out without regard to gender, for Giovanni Tortorici’s Ketticè, a film produced by Luca Guadagnino. It is among the least glamorous roles she has ever accepted. That is precisely the argument the performance makes.

Bellucci plays the mother of a listless teenager in an aristocratic Sicilian household, a woman corroded by the part society has assigned her. “This is a woman who has forgotten about her femininity,” she has said of the character. “She doesn’t take care of herself. And when she talks, she yells.” She described her as “the victim of a social role,” someone who tries to “counterbalance this frustration by eating up snacks.”

For an actress whose stardom was built on the opposite — poise, composure, the held gaze — choosing to inhabit that unravelling is the whole of the work. “It was interesting to play a different role,” Bellucci said, “because this wife and mother tells us about the frustration behind the entire perfection of society.” The award suggests the jury heard that sentence under the shouting.

Read across her filmography, the win looks less like a swerve than a correction. Bellucci began as a fashion model and was cast, for years, for her surface: the breakout of Malèna, the arthouse dare of Gaspar Noé’s Irréversible, a turn as Persephone in the Matrix sequels, an entrance into the Bond franchise as its oldest leading woman. The camera kept arriving at the same conclusion about her. Ketticè refuses to draw it. The performance lets the surface fall away, and a festival that framed its lineup this year as an adventurous one turned out to be the right room to notice.

It matters, too, who stood behind the budget. Tortorici is a young Italian director; Guadagnino, producing, has built a habit of steering emerging Italian filmmakers toward exactly the kind of unsentimental character study that commercial Italian cinema has been accused of abandoning. Bellucci called Tortorici a director “who knows exactly what he wants” and the result “a very personal and really unique film.” Her award reads, quietly, as a vote for that ecosystem — for the small, uningratiating Italian film over the export-ready one.

The night’s headline belonged elsewhere. The Golden Leopard went to the Romanian director Florin Şerban for You Don’t Belong Here, his first feature in eight years and a reminder that the Romanian New Wave still supplies Locarno its moral seriousness — a father-and-son drama built, in Şerban’s words, as “a portrait of a way of seeing the world that may be disappearing.” Kim Min-hee shared the Best Performance prize for Hong Sang-soo’s Nowhere to Lay My Eyes, which also took Best Direction, and the Special Jury Prize went to The Riverbank. Bellucci competed for her award; she did not judge it. The jury, led by the Belgian filmmaker Fabrice Du Welz, sat at the 79th edition of a festival that runs each August on Lake Maggiore, where the Golden Leopard carries a purse of 75,000 Swiss francs shared between a film’s director and producer.

If the rest of the industry is listening, the lesson is uncomfortable and exact: the most bankable face in Italian cinema has just been honored for making herself unrecognizable.

Tags: film festivals, Monica Bellucci, Locarno Film Festival, Florin Şerban, Ketticè