‘Heads or Tails?’ is the Italian anti-western starring Alessandro Borghi

The cinema of Alessio Rigo de Righi and Matteo Zoppis has a lot to do with tradition. It always starts with stories. They did it with their debut The Tale of King Crab, an orally transmitted tale that the directors gave form and body to by bringing it to the big screen, and they repeat this with their second film Heads or Tails?, a legend of what we could define as the first outlaw in the imaginary of the Wild West presented at Cannes in the Un Certain Regard section. A woman who sought to be free and independent and who, in order to achieve her goal, must face a series of losses and vicissitudes. But that’s not the only element of fantasy that Rigo de Righi and Zoppis, also screenwriters, insert into their unpredictable fable: serving as narrator and tying together the unexpected events of Heads or Tails? is the figure of Buffalo Bill, who really existed but is cloaked in a veil of fantasy, a character described by his actor John C. Reilly as bigger than life. A man who made his very existence a legend, placing himself on that liminal boundary between what is real and what is imagined to become immortal. This is exactly what happens in their cinema, with their way of laying out stories and giving the sense of wanting to tell something that has been passed down to them – like the figure of Buffalo Bill whose stories they heard as children – and that they in turn want to perpetuate, delivering it to the audience and hoping they will help keep the tale alive.

It’s the politics of their gaze, of their writing, not programmatic because it is unbound by fixed precise and predetermined rules, as demonstrated by both The Tale of King Crab and Heads or Tails?, but with the aim and boldness to say that it’s possible to make a different kind of cinema in Italy. Thus, using Buffalo Bill as a glue, the authors begin with a handwritten booklet, with pages flowing across the screen that immediately immerse us in a western landscape that we will soon discover to be, as the duo defines it, “anti” and “revisionist”. The genre of Sergio Leone, but not Sergio Leone’s western. More ethereal and less dusty, more magical than brutal, Heads or Tails? deconstructs the canons of the most classic of cinema genres from its very beginning, giving space to the protagonist, French actress Nadia Tereszkiewicz, and redefining its male characters, starting with the fragile cowboy played by Alessandro Borghi. An international trio of actors to tell the dream of America and the desire to reach it, but acting in reverse and, instead of moving closer to the stars and stripes nation, delving into an Italy – more precisely the Roman outskirts – that becomes dirty and revolutionary, crossed by the characters of Rosa and Santino.

The woman, having killed her husband and determined to escape, convinces the man to follow her in what we will very soon understand to be her story, not that of the reckless cowboy. With an objective, on Rosa’s part, greater than just the journey to the United States: the attainment of an independence she is determined to achieve even at the cost of shedding blood. All things that one would never have expected from a woman in the early twentieth century, pushed to self-determination instead of remaining trapped in the bourgeois and restrictive garments of an unhappy and convenient marriage. The film gradually comes to focus on the young woman, misleading at first only to later reveal its noble feminist intent. Crafted as The Tale of King Crab was in terms of setting, with costumes by Andrea Cavalletto – nominated for a David di Donatello for Vermiglio – which in turn tell a story (particularly Rosa’s costume and her “undressing”) and the refined touch of Alessio Rigo de Righi and Matteo Zoppis, Heads or Tails? is an experiment between tradition and reinterpretation with sumptuous means and a delicate gesture. It’s the voice, the presence, and the mustache of John C. Reilly, the whistle with which Alessandro Borghi’s Santino presents himself, and the fire in Nadia Tereszkiewicz’s performance. It’s another story we might read in some book but that Rigo de Righi and Zoppis, like illustrators as well as storytellers, prefer to turn into images.