Open­ing with a tat­tered jour­nal, dam­aged by water and fire and con­tain­ing the writ­ings of an unknown hand, Heads or Tails? will be ​“quite a sto­ry,” as promised in the open­ing voiceover nar­ra­tion of John C. Reil­ly as Buf­fa­lo Cody, the bison hunter and Indi­an Wars vet­er­an turned tour­ing impre­sario of a famous ​“Wild West Show” fea­tur­ing ridin’, ropin’, shootin’, and too-good-to-fact-check sto­ries about how the West was won.

The film opens in Italy, where Buf­fa­lo Bill per­forms his pageant of con­quest for an audi­ence of Uni­fi­ca­tion-era gen­try. Open­ing in black and white and Acad­e­my ratio, like a clas­sic Hol­ly­wood West­ern, the vio­lent Wild West show is ini­tial­ly quite real­is­tic — or as real­is­tic as a clas­sic Hol­ly­wood West­ern — before Buf­fa­lo Bill emerges from behind the cur­tain back­drop, and the aspect ratio widens and the film shifts to cov­er. (The palette retains the pointil­lis­tic sat­u­ra­tion of direc­tors Alessio Rigo de Righi and Mat­teo Zop­pis’ pre­vi­ous film The Tale of King Crab. The cel­lu­loid blues are espe­cial­ly rich and hand­some, and some actors appear to have been cast for their eyes.) ​“Amer­i­ca is the land of free­dom,” says Buf­fa­lo Bill before mim­ing the killing of his Native co-stars; at the sub­se­quent recep­tion and press con­fer­ence, he express­es his admi­ra­tion for them, but they don’t speak.

Inspired by the show, one of Bill’s Ital­ian hosts boasts of his own horsemen’s skills; Bill, sens­ing a good show, takes his bet and sets up a bronc-break­ing exhi­bi­tion, at which San­ti­no (Alessan­dro Borghi), the nobleman’s best hired man and a par­tic­u­lar favorite of his younger French wife Rosa (Nadia Tereszkiewicz), dis­obeys orders to throw the com­pe­ti­tion, and fur­ther catch­es the eye of the fair maid­en — no won­der, as Borghi is a swarthy, pierc­ing Tomas Mil­ian type.) A cow­boy is ​“pure of heart,” says Reil­ly in voiceover as San­ti­no bucks atop a white stal­lion, but as in the sto­ry of Lancelot and Guin­e­vere, chival­ric tra­di­tion and court­ly love get more com­pli­cat­ed than intend­ed. When San­ti­no wins, humil­i­at­ing Bill, his liege con­fronts him, and accus­es his own wife of infi­deli­ty; she shoots him dead with a Lady Der­ringer. Rosa and San­ti­no flee on horse­back in a long scrolling left-to-right track­ing shot, the cam­era dol­ly sprint­ing breath­less­ly to keep up as two race through the mag­ic hour’s actu­al, lit­er­al frisca­lat­ing dusk­light. (Lat­er, at the end of the film, the same horse will ride right to left, into the sunset.)

With his fringed embroi­dered leather jack­et and sil­ver goa­tee, Reil­ly resem­bles the Buf­fa­lo Bill of pho­tographs, a star-span­gled show­man played by, among oth­ers, Louis Cal­h­ern in the rough-and-tum­ble back­stage musi­cal Annie Get Your Gun and Paul New­man in Robert Altman’s Buf­fa­lo Bill and the Indi­ans, or Sit­ting Bull’s His­to­ry Les­son, a cyn­i­cal rasp­ber­ry blown in 1976, after defeat in Viet­nam and at the height of Bicen­ten­ni­al-era patri­o­tism. The char­ac­ter is a straight­for­ward Amer­i­can sig­ni­fi­er that is eas­i­ly bent to revi­sion­ist pur­pos­es, as is the corset that Rosa soon sheds as she and San­ti­no keep ahead of the track­ers on their trail, and the trail of a reward for his cap­ture and her safe return. But despite this, and despite sub­plots such as the revolt of labor­ers against a das­tard­ly rail­road baron, the film is hard­ly in the left­ist tra­di­tion of spaghet­ti West­erns like Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West. As in The Tale of King Crab, an exis­ten­tial quest against a back­drop of South Amer­i­can colo­nial­ism that took a much gen­tler polit­i­cal tack than, say, Martel’s Zama or Gálvez’s The Set­tlers, Rigo de Righi and Zop­pis, and their cowriter Car­lo Sal­sa, are more inter­est­ed in a good yarn — and a meta-dis­course on storytelling.

So as Rosa and San­ti­no escape man­hunters which come to include Buf­fa­lo Bill, Reilly’s nar­ra­tion, which includes chap­ter titles like ​“Kid­napped” and ​“To the Res­cue,” sets a mock-leg­endary tone, and rather mis­con­strues the sto­ry, fol­low­ing the Want­ed posters in cred­it­ing San­ti­no with the incit­ing killing, and mak­ing Rosa out as a hostage rather than a per­pe­tra­tor. Buf­fa­lo Bill’s florid and unre­li­able prose resem­bles, to use his own phrase, one of the ​“dime-store nov­el” that print­ed the leg­end of the emerg­ing West, enlarg­ing its heroes and sand­ing off its bru­tal­i­ty — like the books of Ned Bunt­line, whose sto­ries cre­at­ed the Buf­fa­lo Bill per­sona, and inspired screen West­ern nov­el­ists like W.W. Beauchamp (Saul Rubinek), whose illu­sions are shat­tered in Unfor­giv­en, or indeed Eli Cash in The Roy­al Tenen­baums. Intrigu­ing­ly, though Reil­ly nar­rates in first per­son, the actu­al writer of the voiceover script is Buf­fa­lo Bill’s com­pan­ion and faith­ful amanu­en­sis John­ny, shown through­out the film to be scrib­bling in the note­book from the opening.

As Rosa and San­ti­no weath­er encoun­ters with rev­o­lu­tion­ar­ies and ban­dits, expe­ri­enc­ing jail­breaks and shootouts, greed and betray­al, it’s San­ti­no becomes the sub­ject of out­law bal­lads, which cred­it him as strik­ing a blow against the oli­garchy, rewrit­ing Rosa’s role to be more pas­sive in the ser­vice of polit­i­cal myth­mak­ing. When San­ti­no starts to sing along, and embell­ish his leg­end fur­ther, the appro­pri­a­tion of Rosa’s sto­ry becomes a sore point.

Tak­ing on the iconog­ra­phy of a hoary adven­ture sto­ry with a light touch, Rigo de Righi and Zop­pis don’t always rub suf­fi­cient­ly against the grain of arche­type to gen­er­ate real sparks. The film sags in the mid­dle, and many of its tweaks to for­mu­la, par­tic­u­lar­ly regard­ing Rosa’s recla­ma­tion of her agency, are rote or mere­ly cutesy, despite ris­ing star Tereszkiewicz’s rosy-cheeked mox­ie. But equal­ly there are won­ders here in the vein of the dirty-fin­ger­nailed mag­ic real­ism that is con­tem­po­rary Ital­ian cinema’s most reward­ing mode, as in Alice Rohrwacher’s Hap­py As Laz­zaro and Pietro Marcello’s Scar­let. Cin­e­matog­ra­ph­er Simone D’Arcangelo, who also shot King Crab, lights ani­mals beau­ti­ful­ly, with sub­tle spot­lights, so they stand out as at once earthy and ethe­re­al, like in Night of the Hunter, and Rigo de Righi and Zop­pis retain their eye for rough-hewn peas­ant faces. (King Crab​’s Gabriele Sil­li, with his wild-man beard, and aura of fog­gy vicious­ness, receives a star’s entrance.)

And most of all there’s John C. Reil­ly, who plays Buf­fa­lo Bill with a magician’s pat­ter, like Reed Rothchild in Boo­gie Nights, giv­ing him an ingen­u­ous­ness, a bluffer’s self-sat­is­fied con­fi­dence, and an entrepreneur’s shrewd­ness. He helps great­ly in the film­mak­ers’ mis­sion to put the West­ern in air quotes, to play with­in and com­ment on the genre, in par­tic­u­lar its even more exoti­ciz­ing Euro­pean man­i­fes­ta­tions, like the nov­els of Karl May, the Ned Bunt­line of Ger­many. It’s a mas­sive­ly charis­mat­ic per­for­mance on par with any­thing else in Reilly’s career, and gives all-Amer­i­can sub­stance to this clever Ital­ian mistranslation.

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