“Is it glorious to win with blood?” asks Rosa (Nadia Tereszkiewicz), the olive-skinned wife of a wealthy man in 19th-century Italy. The person on the receiving end of her query is Buffalo Bill (a cheerful John C. Reilly), an American fabulist visiting Europe to perform his cowboys vs. Indians reenactment on how the U.S. stole Indigenous lands by brute force. The retelling paints the colonizers as honorable heroes, not unscrupulous barbarians.An astute Rosa whiffs that Bill’s tall tales are at least partially fiction. And she is about to undergo her own hard-to-believe journey as the heroine of Alessio Rigo de Righi and Matteo Zoppis’ “Heads or Tails?” a spectacularly photographed, wittily written romantic Western about the half-truths and copious embellishments that comprise every myth told by the victors of any conflict across the blood-soaked annals of human history.
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Assertive about her destiny, Rosa commits a crime that frees her from her vicious husband. Key to her escapade is Santino (Alessandro Borghi), a scruffily handsome farmhand who demonstrates he’s the quintessential cowboy, a perfect specimen of a certain tender manliness that attracts the woman on the run. Buffalo Bill describes men like Santino as the combination of bravery and innocence, and the square-jawed Borghi (also memorable in “The Eight Mountains”) exudes that duality. The character’s subdued machismo is infused with an air of cluelessness, which positions Tereszkiewicz’s Rosa as the dominant party in their impromptu entanglement. Her performance enchants with the effortless magnetism of someone with little to lose and plenty to gain if she reaches the U.S. as she desires.
Shot on film, “Heads or Tails?” looks as if it were found in an old tin can in a forgotten corner of a repertory cinema’s archive—that’s a compliment. If told that this movie had been lost for decades and found out of the blue, one would have no reason to doubt such provenance. In charge of its elegantly luscious cinematography is Simone D’Arcangelo, who previously lensed Rigo de Righi and Zoppis’ equally sumptuous debut “The Tale of King Crab” and the Chilean stunner “The Settlers,” also a movie about a national myth marred by carnage. Clearly, shooting vast landscapes that serve as magnificent backdrops for thematically rich period pieces has become D’Arcangelo’s expertise, and he’s already become masterful at it.

Avoiding their persecutors, after a bounty is put on Santino by Rosa’s father-in-law, takes the lovebirds down a winding sequence of misadventures that bring them closer before their fresh, yet fiery bond is tested. War drums underscore their first lovemaking encounter under the open sky, as if heralding that the intimate battle between them may emerge as their biggest hurdle to escape unscathed. Their furious tête-à-têtes reach a boiling point when Santino rejoices in fame that he didn’t earn.
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Preserving the Argentine connection present in “The Tale of King Crab,” a revolutionary from the South American country (played by Peter Lanzani) crosses their path, eager to exploit Santino’s apocryphal legend (everyone believes he killed an oligarch), as the poster child to instill encouragement among the oppressed proletariat. The once humble Santino basks in the inebriating ego-boost of becoming a hero, and thus the truth about what actually transpired and who pulled the trigger becomes irrelevant.
Time and again, Rosa refuses to allow men to take credit for her courage. But when Santino loses his head after an ambush, she pushes on, grieving the loss of her beloved companion in crime, but determined to write her own history moving forward. Rigo de Righi and Zoppis seem fascinated with how storytelling impacts society and shapes how people within it see themselves or strive to change. Both folktales and the sanctioned retelling of major events are assembled from smithereens of truth affixed to imagined scenarios devised to advance a deliberate narrative. Most of history is propaganda.
Later in “Heads or Tails?,” a confrontation occurs between Reilly’s affable Buffalo Bill and a gun-toting Rosa involving the titular toss-up. Their run-in plays out like a clash between deceit and veracity. Whatever version of what transpires becomes the official story has more to do with chance than with verifiable events. Fact and fiction are two sides of the same coin.
“Heads or Tails?” is at once uniquely ravishing and reinvigorating about the artistry and thoughtfulness that’s still possible in modern cinema. The way that Rigo de Righi and Zoppis make films is only comparable to the care that old-world craftsmen and artisans, whose painstaking vocation has been honed through generations, employed to produce the most delectable wine, or carve a one-of-a-kind piece of durable furniture.
Theirs are slow-simmered films—the antithesis to soulless AI-generated images— feel like they have always been here, just waiting to be unearthed. In that sense, the idea that most historical accounts are adorned falsehoods, closer to fables than reality, feels right at home in this gorgeous mirage about an unsung paladin who triumphed by remaining unknown. [A]
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