Chiusura - Closing

"In a town in Italy, about which we learn nothing, a hairdresser's salon is about to close for good. In another few weeks the premises will be knocked down. After forty-four years, its owner, Flavia, is looking forward to a well-earned rest. Her final days at the salon are filmed by Alessandro Rossetto, and intercut with his parallel observation of a small travelling circus setting up, and one of the salon's clients, a young girl, training with the local women's football team.
So far underlying the apparently commonplace in this film there's a profound bleakness. From the conversations between Flavia and her old clients, the montage retains only their exposition of the appalling thins that have happened to them, or their exposition of the apparelling things that have happened to them, or their comments on current affairs. In that bantering tone used in chatting, with no visible distress, one of them talks about losing there of her children, on of them from drowning. Another refers to a piece in a tabloid about Reagan having Alzheimer's. Another pair discuss Tutsi massacres of the Hutus in Rwanda. Flavia moves from one to the other, burdened with her own particular sadness, whilst the radio plays downbeat popular songs like Dalida's Parole Parole. Meanwhile the women's football team is about to fall apart following a series of lost matches, as they take turns to settle old scores and play out individual psychodramas. Driving home, each alone at the wheel, their malaise is felt as these young women sing along to forlorn love songs on the radio. As for the little circus show, it is nothing like those baroque and flamboyant affairs we know from Fellini films, and it attracts only handful of people.
The taking down of the tent is matched by the dismantling of the hairdresser's salon. And at the end of the film, as if reality had offered a gift to this film-maker, so alert to every coincidence of language and situation, an old woman appears from nowhere in the empty shop ; she can no longer remember her address or her son's name, like a metaphor for Flavia's future as she, in leaving her shop, leaves behind a lifetime's bearings. Does the title Closing refer to something more than the salon's closure, to a much deeper crisis ; is Alessandro Rossetto in some way indicating a grim future for Italian society ?"
(Yann-Olivier Wich)