Home and Away: Nanni Moretti's The Last Customer and the Ground Zero of Transnational Identities

While being in many ways consistent with Moretti's previous work, +The Last Customer= (2002) points to an emerging concern in the work of this 'very Italian' director with the international dimension of his cinema. The documentary, which bears witness to the closure of a 100-year-old Italian pharmacy in New York, is a reflection on the creation and destruction of transnational identities. The small store - a 'home away from home' not only for its owners, but also for its customers - hosted a community formed by a disparate group of people in real or imaginary diaspora, and threatened by the workings of late capitalism. The transnational character of this store depended on its being somewhere in-between at least two imaginary places: an Italy on its way to becoming extinct, with its ethics of the family business and institution of the neighbourhood store; and a myth, also fading, of the multiracial American metropolis.