Heads or Tails? (7/10)
by Tony Medley
113 minutes
R
Set in the early 1900s, this Italian-American “spaghetti western” weaves real-life history with a gritty, fable-like love story. The title refers to a pivotal coin toss within the narrative, a moment that raises the stakes and echoes the themes of chance, fate, and whose version of the story “wins” in the end.
Buffalo Bill (John C. Reilly) arrives in Italy with his Wild West show. There, he faces Ercole Rupè (Mirko Artuso), a local landowner whose Italian cowboys, the butteri, rival Bill’s Americans. Santino (Allesandro Borghi), a standout buttero, secretly yearns for freedom, while Rosa (Nadia Tereszkiewicz), Rupè’s abused French wife, admires Santino and dreams of escape to America.
During the contest, Rupè bets on the Americans and instructs his men to lose on purpose. However, Santino disobeys and wins the match, humiliating both Bill and Rupè. In a fit of rage, Rupè accuses Rosa of infidelity, prompting her to shoot him dead. Rosa and Santino then flee together, heading for the American frontier. At the same time, Rupè’s wealthy father (Gianno Garko) places a bounty on Santino’s head and hires Buffalo Bill to track them down. Along their journey, the lovers encounter anarchists, bandits, and soldiers. Santino becomes an unintentional folk-hero outlaw, symbolizing rebellion against the wealthy elite. However, greed and betrayal reach a climax.
Buffalo Bill eventually catches up to Rosa and proposes a game of “heads or tails” to decide whether they will fight or if she can go free; the result of the coin toss remains ambiguous. Nevertheless, Rosa moves on, personifying both victim and avenger in a story that deliberately blurs the edges between fact, myth, and pure legend.
Directed by Alessio Rigo de Righi and Matteo Zoppis from a script by them and Carlo Salsa, this film has fine cinematography (Simone Arcangelo) and lush locations. As the latest spaghetti western, it’s not up to the three Clint Eastwood films, but it’ll do, buttressed by good performances.
While Buffalo Bill and his Wild West show visiting Europe is based on documented history, the characters Rosa and Santino, their flight to the American frontier, and most of the dramatic events—such as betrayals, bounty hunters, and Rosa’s journey are invented or stylized to evoke the feeling of a folk legend rather than a documentary-style retelling of real events. Thus, you can think of it as a “historically inspired fable”—rooted in the real world of Buffalo Bill and early 20th-century myth-making, but not a true story by factual standards.
Tony Medley is an attorney, columnist, and MPAA-accredited film critic whose reviews and articles may be read in several newspapers and at rottentomatoes.com, CWEB.com, robinhoodnews.com, Movie Review Query Engine (mrqe.com), and at www.tonymedley.com. A former sports editor of the UCLA Daily Bruin, he is the author of four books, UCLA Basketball: The Real Story, Sweaty Palms: The Neglected Art of Being Interviewed, the first book ever written on the interview for the interviewee, having sold over a half million copies, and The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Bridge, which has sold over 100,000 copies, and Learn to Play Bridge Like a Boss. He is an American Contract Bridge League Ruby Life Master and an ACBL accredited director. He is a Mensa Life Member and a member of the International Society of Philosophic Research, ISPE (“The Thousand”).
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