KABLUEY

(Directed by Scott Prendergast; 2007, US, 86m)

Review By Carolan Guernsey

Salman (Scott Prendergast) is paid $6 an hour to stand on the side of a highway in a blue foam-rubber suit as Kabluey, the corporate mascot of BlueNexion, a failing Internet company in Texas. Though Salman has a hard time doing his job – the fliers he’s supposed to pass out keep slipping out of his inflated blue paws – he manages to find “an odd kind of transcendence in the work. He becomes two people: one a lost 32-year-old boy cowering inside the suit, the other the adorable, bobbing and shuffling Kabluey who inspires cuddly affection,” writes Stephen Holden in The New York Times, adding that Kabluey “portrays a demoralized American work force fearfully going through the motions of life while waiting without much hope for things to get better.”

Kabluey is a film about a man who tries to find meaning…ultimately through work.  In fact, it’s not a stretch to say that this movie is absurdist.  The comedy is broad and visual.  Think BIG costumes and slapstick.  Salman is pathetic and stranded in enemy territory, forced to be Mr. Nanny to the breathing definition of Army brats, awaking every day to one telling him he will kill him.   We are shown so many things are humanly impossible, or at least feel that way.  How many times do stacks of bills feel insurmountable?

Salman’s daily bus ride is the height of the repetition.  Get on, see the mother-daughter, daughter babbling about the boss crush, mother rolling eyes, man with the plaid thermos, shows thermos… It is splendid.  Nothing has meaning.  He stands by the side of the road with the flyers day after day, but his costume has no hands, so he always drops them and they scatter in the wind …yet he still continues to have a job.

Salman’s attempt to bring some kind of order in his life fails miserably and only brings him more and more conflict.  His nephews routinely try to kill him with ordinary household chemicals and sharp objects in food.  When he leaves the house for outside employment, a woman inexplicably (to him) tries to run him over with her car at every available opportunity.

This is a very thought provoking film.  What kind of world are we in indeed?  How do we, as a country, deem it essential to take a man out of his home, and demand that he stay halfway across the world, to fight for reasons we cannot even clearly articulate? 

What kind of country are we that we are filled with people who lead lives so meaningless that they hop from bed to bed and spouse to spouse out of boredom and spoil our children hideously? 

What is fascinating about Kabluey was that it addresses very similar issues to Stop Loss, just in a different manner.  When you get down to it, this deals directly with Iraq, infidelity, and family.  Yet it is a funny, entertaining film that flies by.