Testa o Croce: a new Western film that divides its viewers

Translated by Mariateresa Tauro

Testa o Croce? (English: Heads or Tails?) by Matteo Zoppis and Alessio Rigo de Righi - written with Carlo Salsa - is a film belonging to a boundary area where the western reborns, taking control of its symbols only to destroy them from the inside. A production between Italy and the US that reflects the double identity of its authors. By overlapping the authors’ lives and cinematographic fiction, the film is on the edge between the Tuscan origins of the butteri (Tuscan mounted herders) and the American image of the border.

Since the very first gaze, the film declares its ancestry: the references to Sergio Leone, Corbucci, and Sollima are visible as conscious ghosts. However, Testa o Croce does not try to imitate them; it conceives them as a pretext to redefine the myth of the genre. The dust, the guns, and the duels at sunset aren’t conquest tools anymore, but accessories of an upside-down parable. The white man who tames nature and redeems himself by violence is no longer at the centre. He is replaced by Rosa, Nadia Tereszkiewicz, the woman who makes decisions, who kills, who rewrites faith without asking for permission.

Santino, interpreted by a moderate and realistic Alessandro Borghi, does not abandon himself to the “heroic cowboy” rhetoric until the instant before his departure. He becomes a mute counterpoint to Rosa’s determination. In addition, John C. Reilly plays the part of a Buffalo Bill in decline, who becomes the symbol of an America that has idealised its own cruelty to the point of turning it into a spectacle. Its presence is the memory of the Western itself: a mask that survives, a performance that the film demystifies scene after scene.

The Tuscan Rupè family, with its connections to the agricultural culture and its presumption of nobility, acts as a counterbalance to the American mythology: two worlds separated by landscape, but united by the illusion of power. One colonises the western valleys, the other the Maremma; both rely on the same idea of a male and paternalist domain.

At the cinema, Testa o Croce? has turned out to be not only a social experiment, but also a cinematographic one. In a limited area —a 40-seat movie theatre where each breath becomes part of the collective experience —the film has demonstrated how much, nowadays, the cinema can still be a place of friction. Reactions were immediate and physical: starts, sighs and continued murmurs - the grumbling of an aged man, seated at a little distance, who seemed not to accept the idea that a western film might survive without its original rules. According to him, the film by Zoppis and Rigo de Righi is a swerve, a heresy: it is too different to be considered a true western, too similar to be defined as something else.

But it is precisely in that conflict, between those who reject it and those who welcome it, that the vitality of the film is measured. Testa o Croce? becomes a mirror of the public, a lens that puts life and fiction on the same level: what happens on stage finds its immediate reflection in the viewers’ reactions. Each gesture, each word, each silence shown on the screen translates into a short emotional circuit.

The grumbling of the man is not only an annoyance, but it’s proof. It’s the sign that the film has touched a living area, the one belonging to the collective memory of the genre. In its most classical form, the Western still lives in the bodies and habits of those who have loved it for decades. It does not ask to be forgotten; it requires to be compared to what remains.

In this context, Testa o Croce? becomes not only a narrative experiment but also an anthropological one, a way to understand how much we are still attached to the past myths and how much we are ready to betray them.

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Image source: https://www.festival-cannes.com/en/f/testa-o-croce/

Testa o Croce, directed by Alessio Rigo de Righi and Matteo Zoppis – © Festival de Cannes