Testa o croce?

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Heads or Tails? is available to purchase on-demand.

DIRECTED BY: Alessio Rigo de Righi, Matteo Zoppis

FEATURING: Nadia Tereszkiewicz, Alessandro Borghi, John C. Reilly

PLOT: An Italian cowboy and the wife of a brutal army captain flee into the wilderness after an incident during a bronco-riding contest between Italians and Buffalo Bill’s traveling wild west show, and the captain’s father hires Buffalo Bill himself to track down the refugees.

COMMENTS: If you’re excited to see a Western with beloved character actor John C. Reilly portraying Buffalo Bill Cody—which is how Heads or Tails? pitches itself—prepare for some mild disappointment. Cody does feature in the story, which takes its impetus from a real-life incident where local Italian cowboys (butteri) trounced Bill’s wild west show in an impromptu rodeo. But soon after the results are in, Bill nearly disappears from the story, which instead follows blue-eyed buttero Santino and the intensely-freckled French Rosa as they flee into the wilderness, accused of a terrible crime. Eventually tracked by Bill and others, the pair have mildly diverting adventures that include meeting up with a band of anarchists who want to make Santino into a revolutionary hero.

More Buffalo Bill would have been great, because the two leads, while attractive (both have piercing blue eyes), lack the chemistry and passion needed to get us invested in their outlaw escapades. The plot moves slowly, with too many scenes involving nothing more than the pair hiking through a swamp or camping out, and contains few true surprises. Their lovemaking looks like they know the camera is watching. Even a jailbreak offers little thrill. About all that we know about Rosa is that wants to move to America to rebuild her life, and stoic Santino has little character at all. Bill, played by Reilly with a showman’s panache, is far too interesting a character to sit on the sidelines for most of the movie while we watch these dull lovebirds instead.

Stylistically, the film is an appropriate recreation of a 60s-70s Italian western, complete with melodramatic acting (Bill, in particular, seems like he’s always performing even when he’s not on stage) and some humorously obvious dubbing. The Tuscan locations—which include a cool seaside grotto—don’t recreate the American west, but do look appropriately primal on their own. The “surreal” twist hinted at in some reviews is misleading; it’s more of a brief magical-realist bit, attributable to the heroine’s traumatized psyche (although it does suggest an even more feverish take on Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia—more of this, and we might really have had something here). Heads or Tails? also includes a few jabs at colonialism (the expressions on the Indians’ faces as the genocidal Bill brags about their noble culture are priceless) and nods to feminism (Rosa is the central figure and the toughest hombre in the film). But it’s not self-consciously revisionist so much as dedicated to the setting’s historical accuracy. Heads or Tails? comes up as a spaghetti western retread with modest art-house ambitions. But it never really decides which way it wants to go: full-throttle homage or sly postmodern parody. It probably should have settled on either heads or tails, and left out the question mark.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…sometimes failure is more interesting than success, and Heads or Tails? is a beautiful, beautifully acted, weird, sharply funny revisionist western taking on two cinematic traditions with the kind of knives-out bravura that contemporary cinema needs more of.”–Sarah Marrs, Lainey Gossip (contemporaneous)