Adil Hussain chews on a toothpick for nearly twenty minutes of Zed Plus before the character even opens his mouth to speak about the local politics of his dusty Rajasthan town. It's a small thing, but it bugged me because the prop department clearly forgot about it in the wide shots, leaving us with a man who is actively gnawing on birchwood in close-ups while his medium-shot counterpart stands there completely empty-handed. Dr. Chandra Prakash Dwivedi has never been a filmmaker who cares deeply about spatial continuity, preferring instead to let the ideological noise of his screenplay drown out any minor logistical lapses regarding toothpicks or background extras. You watch his films for the sheer friction of people shouting at one another across narrow village lanes, and here that friction is cranked up until the local administration starts looking like a circus tent caught in a gale-force wind. Bollywood movies have rarely known what to do with satire unless it comes wrapped in the broad slapstick of David Dhawan or the sugar-coated social reform of early Hrishikesh Mukherjee, so a middle-ground farce about a puncture repairman accidentally getting designated as the most heavily guarded VIP in the country feels remarkably peculiar from the first frame. Hussain plays Aslam Puncturewala with the kind of weary resignation you usually only see in exhausted schoolteachers who have given up on the curriculum.

The premise owes a heavy debt to the sort of bureaucratic absurdity that Mario Monicelli used to pull off with a straight face in mid-century Italian cinema, though Dwivedi is far too eager to spell out the punchlines before the audience has even finished laughing at the setup. A local politician needing votes decides to appease a marginalized minority by demanding that the most ordinary citizen of that demographic receive Z-plus security overnight, turning Aslam's ramshackle hut into a fortress guarded by commandos who spend most of their time complaining about the local heat and the lack of decent mobile network coverage. It is a very simple joke, yet the screenplay stretches it across two and a half hours by introducing corrupt ministers, opportunistic journalists, and religious leaders who want to use the poor mechanic as a pawn in their elaborate chess matches for local supremacy. Mona Singh brings a grounded, weary energy to the proceedings as Aslam’s wife, though she spends half her screen time reacting to her husband's sudden fame with the exact same expression she used during her television days when someone dropped a tray of tea. Mukesh Tiwari and Sanjay Mishra arrive later to chew whatever scenery hasn't already been flattened by the wind, playing local fixers with a greasy charm that makes you wish the movie had just abandoned the political plot entirely to follow them around the tea stalls. Mishra has this way of dropping his chin into his chest mid-sentence that completely shifts the rhythm of a scene, reminding you why actors of his caliber often carry these shaggy dog stories entirely on their backs.

There is a specific kind of ugliness to the cinematography that feels entirely intentional, a blown-out, sun-bleached look that makes every exterior shot of the desert town feel like it was filmed through a dirty windshield. The soundtrack, meanwhile, relies on an accordion-heavy folk motif that loops itself so many times during the second act that you start hearing it in your sleep when you close your eyes after turning off the screen. Kulbhushan Kharbanda pops up as a prime minister who speaks almost exclusively in high-minded idioms while his cabinet colleagues scramble under the table for their cell phones, a performance that feels oddly reminiscent of his work in Manik Chatterjee's lesser-seen political dramas from the nineties. Hindi films have a long and mostly dishonorable tradition of treating politicians as either saints or cartoon villains without any intermediate shades of bureaucratic incompetence, so watching Kharbanda play a leader who is simply exhausted by the logistics of staying in power is rather refreshing even when the jokes fall flat. The writing doesn't bother with subtle transitions, jumping from a domestic argument over water bills to a high-level security briefing involving men in mirrored sunglasses who take themselves far too seriously. If I'm honest, the whole middle section sags under the weight of its own cleverness, refusing to let a single satirical point land without an extra three lines of dialogue explaining why the common man is always the one holding the bag.

What keeps the whole enterprise afloat is Hussain's stubborn refusal to play Aslam as a symbol of the downtrodden masses. He plays him instead as a guy who just wants to fix tires and occasionally smoke a beedi in peace, treating the black cats and the intelligence officers like annoying salesmen who won't leave the porch. When the politicians try to use him for photo ops, his eyes go completely dead, losing any trace of the comedic warmth that normally defines the genre. This is where the film finds its teeth, stepping away from the easy laughs of the first hour to look at how state power colonizes ordinary lives without even asking for permission. You see the same kind of tonal whiplash in many contemporary Hindi movies that try to smuggle political critique past the censors by wrapping it in farce, but Dwivedi pushes the cynicism a bit further than usual, suggesting that neither the secularists nor the nationalists actually give a damn about Aslam's punctured tires. The closing scenes abandon comedy altogether for a sequence involving a public rally where the speeches sound less like campaign promises and more like hostage negotiations conducted through loudspeakers.

That abrupt shift from lightweight satire to bitter allegory leaves a strange taste in the mouth, refusing to offer the comforting resolution that audiences usually expect from stories about the triumph of the little guy against the machine. There are no grand speeches about democracy, no tears shed over the loss of innocence, and no real victory for Aslam other than the fact that the guards eventually pack up their tents and leave him back to his pneumatic pump and his loose gravel. It's a messy, overstuffed piece of work that probably could have lost twenty minutes of shouting in the committee rooms without anyone noticing, yet its refusal to tidy up its own arguments gives it a ragged authenticity missing from more polished political satires.