★★★½☆
Salón de Belleza is an obscure and unconventional exploration of life, death and what it means to live while knowing the end is coming.
Rather than presenting these ideas through a straightforward narrative, the film relies heavily on metaphors and imagery. It creates an experience that isn’t always easy to understand or even necessarily supposed to be completely understood.
At the center of the film is a beauty salon that has been transformed into a place for dying people to spend the final moments of their lives. A place that was once centered around beauty and physical appearance becomes a place where those things ultimately don’t matter anymore.
“There is something strangely beautiful about turning a place dedicated to physical appearance into a place for people approaching the end of their lives.”
It’s an interesting contradiction that the film continually explores. Beauty is normally associated with youth, health and life, while the salon has become surrounded by sickness, deterioration and death.
Throughout the film, we continually see fish and aquariums, creating another metaphor for the lives of the people inside the salon. The fish live inside these small, confined environments, continuing to exist until they eventually don’t.
The film doesn’t necessarily explain exactly what these images are supposed to mean. Instead, it allows them to exist alongside the story and leaves much of the interpretation to the audience.
“The fish become more than simply background imagery; they become another way for the film to explore life and death without directly explaining itself.”
It’s an approach that makes Salón de Belleza interesting but also occasionally difficult to connect with.
The film is incredibly abstract and unorthodox. There are moments where the imagery and metaphors become more important than the actual narrative, creating a film where the ideas behind it are ultimately more memorable than many of the individual details.
Yet there is something fascinating about the way the film approaches death.
Instead of simply presenting death as something tragic or horrifying, Salón de Belleza explores what it means for someone to continue living when they know death is coming. The salon gives these people somewhere to exist during the final moments of their lives, treating them as people rather than simply dying patients.
“It’s ultimately a film about death that seems far more interested in what it means to continue living.”
Salón de Belleza is not going to work for everyone. Its obscure and metaphorical approach can make the film difficult to fully connect with, especially as it moves further away from a conventional narrative.
Yet beneath its abstract nature is an insightful exploration of mortality, beauty and the strange relationship between living and dying.
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