Heads or Tails? Film Review

Cinematografo

By Valerio Sammarco

May 22, 2025

[Heads or tails? by Alessio Rigo de Righi and Matteo Zoppis]

 In 1890, during one of the countless tours of his re-enactment show, the Wild West Show, the legendary Buffalo Bill Cody accepted the challenge of Duke Onorato Caetani, near Cisterna di Latina: it was thus that the cowboy Augusto Imperiali, together with other companions, got the better of the Yankee team, taming and riding the American foals longer than those.

Alessio Rigo de Righi and Matteo Zoppis probably take their cue from this legendary event (an elementary school was named after "Augustarello", a commemorative statue was erected, then inspired books and a biographical comic strip) to set up their second fiction film, Heads or tails?, hosted in Un Certain Regard at Cannes 78.

They therefore return to the Croisette four years after King Crab, then selected by the Directors' Fortnight. And they do so with a film that once again looks to the western and the picaresque, which mixes languages - of speech, of gaze - and which reflects on the many nuances of a story, on the infinite possibilities it has to vary depending on who, and how, passes it on. Or what is the convenience of telling it in a certain way...

[Nadia Tereszkiewicz in Heads or tails?]

 To narrate it, in a sense, is Buffalo Bill himself (John C. Reilly), to punctuate it four chapters, to live it Rosa (Nadia Tereszkiewicz) and Santino (Alessandro Borghi), she the unhappy wife of the local squire, he a herdsman who wins the taming challenge by "betraying" the will of his master.

Their escape, which then becomes one of love, will naturally be fraught with pitfalls and unforeseen events. The mirage (for Rosa) is America, but the real one, not the fake and cardboard version of the re-enactments of conquest.

"Every great nation was born with violence," the cowboy himself reminds her in the preamble. And in spite of herself, Rosa will not be told twice to save herself and then emancipate herself definitively.

 

[Alessio Rigo de Righi and Matteo Zoppis on set]

More inclined to a narrative less entrusted to the transfiguration of the epic as in the previous film, Rigo de Righi and Zoppis do not lose their lyrical and earthy inspiration, however, recall Gabriele Silli (then the protagonist) to entrust him with the role of the ambiguous Zecchino and overturn the perception of the figure of Santino along the way, on whose head following the murder of the master (who did not commit him...) hangs a large bounty.

And precisely for this reason he is raised as an emblematic hero by a small group of insurrectionalist anarchists. So where is the truth? And the justice that should ensure it?

Doubts that literally make you lose your head and then put a cross on them.