Firstly, it works as a vehicle for a powerful and urgent message. It is indeed simple: road safety and the follies of reckless driving. And, surprise, this is conveyed without any melodrama or propaganda. It is straight, in your face and running throughout the film. It is placed caringly as a silent, brooding undercurrent lest it end up as a documentary from department of transport.In the end, when it culminates, the message is hard hitting and moving. No pun intended.
Secondly, the film works as a social satire. Saravanan, the director, finds satirical and sardonic humour in events as common as visiting coffee shops or travelling in share autos. Here, he pits unlikely characters against these events to evoke the intended humour. The lower middle class girl's need to visit an upmarket coffee shop, the innonce of a rustic boy working in a town and his brush with upmarket living. In a developed world, the rich don't need to interact with the middle class because the gap is so wide and neither could or would want to bridge. In India, although the bridge is slowly widening, the line is still thin and still there are cross-overs and such encounters are tragic if not hilarious. Artists and filmmakers have often attempted to identify this encounters, of poor witnessing the rich life or social rural aping the upmarket town. Often these encounters ended up as scornful or scathing leftist attack. In EE, Saravanan doesn't take a moral stand. In fact we don't even know his stand. He stops short of placing his characters in such unlikely events and watching them perform. It's like the director has as much fun watching them fumble as we do.
Thirdly, despite the grim nature of the message, the film is hugely entertaining. It's so much fun that it is possible to ignore the message. Saravanan, being acutely aware of this, ensures that the message is not lost in all that rollicking we witness. Shakespeare would call this comedy whereas the DVD rental libraries would stack this film in the comedy section.
A friend who watched the film with me asked, 'Why should we care only for the characters and not for others in the film?' The question relates to the accident in the film where the lead characters were part of the other passengers, some we're introduced to but most remain unknown. The question is a valid one: why do we wish that the lead characters remain safe but don't care for others who die in the accident? Isn't it cruel to watch with impunity the death of several passengers whilst caring eagerly for the well-being of only four (or five) people? What kind of message is it if the filmmaker makes us insensitive to the sufferings of unknown passengers and tries to convey the urgent message of road safety and reckless driving? Actually he doesn't. The message is as much about the individual suffering as it is about the collective damage it wrecks. The accident scene is one of the most spectacularly shot action sequences in the recent times. It is not shot for the mere spectacle because you aren't looking at the effects, which are awesome by the way, but you're actually glued to the details. The word 'accident' is brought completely alive, with flesh and blood. Yes, literally flesh and blood and smoke and fumes and dust and shock and awe and death. You feel the bending rusted steel beams and engulfing dust. You witness an accident from inside the bus and you know what it does to people. How ruthless it is, how it not just kills or injures but breaks hearts, snatches away people's dreams, breaks apart lovers, destroys hopes, irrevocably decimates life. All because someone was honking madly, someone forgot to check breaks, someone was drunk, someone didn't watch the speedometer. Or someone simply didn't care.
Talking about caring, although we do care for all the passengers, we care more for the main ones. And it is key to the ending.
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