Mine was right next to me so I checked... I don't find it difficult to close. There is a touch of initial resistance but it clicks over assuredly without the feeling that I may break it.
Hopefully you get it closing to your satisfaction, they're fun little automatic cameras. I find that mine has a pleasing amount of vignetting, maybe a bit more than an XA but not as much as an LC-A and much sharper than the latter. Only drawback I find is that it's got a rather high pitched and noisy film advance shutter firing sound that has always given me the impression that it were destroying itself with shot.