There are several ways to read Rosa (Nadia Tereszkiewicz) loosening up her corset after complaining it’s too tight near the start of “Testa o Croce? (Heads or Tails?)” Most immediately it brings a smile at a moment when “liberty” is made into a malleable term by Buffalo Bill Cody (John C. Reilly), who has brought his Wild West Show to Italy at the behest of the wealthy family she’s married into, and he simultaneously extolls the virtues of “the land of the free” while recounting all the Native Americans he had to slaughter. (When many are needed to bring an authenticity to the show, they are “now family in the theatrical endeavor,” he’ll later tell Rosa afterwards, as commerce has a way of smoothing these things out.) However, Rosa endures bondage beyond her bodice in being betrothed to a general who doesn’t want to hear of her complaints and more intriguingly, she’s seen as an uncomfortable fit in the historical setting of co-directors Alessio Rigo de Righi and Matteo Zoppis’ choosing, constrained to occupying a certain minor role in the grand sweep of things when she’s clearly a pivotal figure. Still, when men like her husband and Buffalo Bill will puffs out their chest to assert themselves as the era’s great heroes, their boasts are more likely to resonate than her silence when recounted by others after their deaths.
Beyond giving Rosa plenty of room to breathe in their piquant and provocative second narrative feature, Righi and Zoppis keep things loose, treating the past as highly vulnerable to different interpretations. The film pleasantly reminds of not one but two films by someone else with a similar irreverent streak in Robert Altman with its obvious connection to “Buffalo Bill and the Indians,” when the director had no less an icon than Paul Newman play the legendary cowboy in the sad spectacle of his twilight years, and the outlaw romance of “McCabe & Mrs. Miller,” as Rosa, complete with a frizzy Julie Christie-esque do, is forced to flee town with a handsome and devious stranger named Santino (Alessandro Borges). The fate of the two become intertwined when Santino refuses to take a dive for Rosa’s husband in a rodeo event that Buffalo Bill has set up after claiming Americans are superior cowboys. While the locals show their national pride in wagering on the Italian, the general sees the big bet as an opportunity to clean up. Instead, he is wiped out both financially and mortally when a threat against Santino backfires and Rosa kills him to protect them both.
It shouldn’t matter who was holding the gun when Santino and Rosa are in the same amount of trouble, but it’s assumed it was Santino with his Y chromosome and given what the general represented as the scion of a powerful family looking to gain even more regional control with the construction of a railroad, he’s celebrated as a folk hero by revolutionaries who are happy to help him and Rosa hide. Still, despite the security, the latter can’t help be but mildly chagrined by who’s getting the credit even as the adrenaline of being on the lam stirs passion and a threat to their relationship grows from within.
Their adventures are related with grandiosity by Buffalo Bill, who is enlisted to chase Rosa and Santino down by the general’s father when it was his event that caused the commotion in the first place and as he offers narration framing events he wasn’t a part of, there’s a constant awareness of the embellishment and outright lies that make their way into the official record when to question them would be to ruin a good story. However, as much as “Heads or Tails?” delights as a yarn between Reilly relishing every line as Bill, Simone D’Arcangelo’s cinematography that’s easy on the eyes and a jaunty score from Vittorio Giampietro, it unravels how history is written by the winners and the power that perceived precedence holds. The possibility of making an escape becomes bittersweet when a clean getaway from the current threat Rosa and Santino face entails erasing any trace that they ever existed, leaving future generations with no example that there was once resistance to events and ideas now considered sacrosanct. Then again when Righi and Zoppis’ revisionist western isn’t easily forgotten, there’s hope yet that pioneers like Rosa aren’t either.
“Testa or Croce? (Heads or Tails?)” will screen again at the Cannes Film Festival as part of Un Certain Regard on May 23rd at 9:15 am at Cineum Screen X and 9 pm at the Salle Bazin.