Rats

RATS / Production Design Concept / Jan Kadlec / 2020
One world and three stories that define it.
And each of them has its own dream.
“Illegal”
“Ill.eg.al”
il . ēgō . ôl
ɪˈliːɡ(ə)l

The concept of three worlds emerged from translating the original screenplay title, “Nelegál” (Illegal).
Then it took just a small step to divide the word into ILL. EG. AL(L). That’s how this twisted phrase “the sick ego of all” was born, serving as an apt metaphor for today’s utterly distorted understanding of democracy. This fragmented word became the foundation for my interpretation of the entire story of a drug dealer, a policewoman, and a Vietnamese mobster. And once I re-examined the original story through this new lens, it became clear that each of them must be seen differently than they first appear. Each has their own world, shaped by their own contexts. Nothing is ever quite as it seems and perhaps things aren’t the way we insist on reading them. David, the young man, had only his dream. The policewoman, whom I began calling simply “the Woman”, is a figure trapped in the present which is why her story has no clear end. How it all turns out, even I cannot say within the framework of visual storytelling. And Dang, the Vietnamese man, is merely doing what others do: creating value for future generations. Like his parents and grandparents before him, he has “latched onto” something that the local market has long abandoned. That it happens to be drugs is only the basic platform a convenient means for generating an endless stream of crime stories.
I am not a fan of television crime dramas. So, to fulfill the request to formulate the visual concept for this project, I had to find at least some spark of interest in this otherwise unappealing world. Three distinct stories, all connected together define our ordinary, serialized world. Each of these stories has a clearly articulated visual identity, built on color, subtle detail, and, most importantly, on how each character perceives their own world. Nothing shown is accidental, everything has its specific reason.
Ill.Eg.All #1 – Dang
A world full of history and heavy traditions, unable to wake up… or move forward. A world weighed down by its own customs, like under a feather quilt in deep sleep, lulled by the fairy tale of its own irreplaceability. And so, the blindness of its ruler becomes its own downfall. Because that once-unknown message from distant forests is now the inner force of a “start-up” society one necessarily driven forward, toward power and the throne. The world surrounding the Vietnamese mobster Dang is constructed exactly as everyone imagines it to be. His working habitat and the environment of his operations are defined by the aesthetics of cheap markets clad in corrugated metal, with steamed-up windows of Asian eateries where the smell of broth lingers. Even his family residence is presented within this deliberately pre-set aesthetic.
The esplanade of his home, somewhere in the place where the newly forming post-revolution society mistakenly planted its roots, is adorned with hints of his original world. Otherwise, it is a monochrome America, where everyone owns the same, and no visible difference remains. Back then, it was freedom, luxury, joy and today, it is only emptiness. Our once-proud world of the 1990s, we now willingly leave to the people of “new worlds.” Everything is as everyone imagines it.
The only thing that seems different visible even from afar, is the glaring whiteness of their steel machines, marked with four rings or a star enclosed in a circle, embedded in the car’s front. So when Dang arrives home, he is naturally welcomed by the melody of an Asian doorbell, echoing within this context. And to us, the voyeurs, armed with our neat assumptions, a paper dragon waves its tail from a distance and wishes us a good day in the illusion of our own irreplaceability.
An illusion, because things are not always as they seem. As a distant, though not directly related, example I think of my favorite Swiss Tourism video titled Preparation. Although its ending draws attention to illusion, the truth is the opposite: the video builds its essence precisely on illusion one that, in fact, is not an illusion at all. It is a refined message that gently assures us there is nothing to fear that we are all the same. But that remains only in those often-quoted words…The truth, it is not. In the end, everyone still clings to their own traditions. But what are traditions, really? They mostly arose as the habits of specific places, isolated by nature, mountains, seas, rivers - cut off from the rest of the world. In today’s long-interconnected global society, however, any attachment to tradition borders on the absurd. This persistent insistence on so-called “deep traditions” now points rather to nationalism. And nationalism, within a society built on communication, has always been, and always will be, its downfall. Either stay home, locked in isolation, or communicate and by doing so, prosper. But also, sacrifice. Everything is balanced; nothing is ever purely black or white. No tradition is as original as its story claims to be. When the front door closes behind him, this ambassador of Vietnamese culture touches thegolden Bang & Olufsen phallic speaker, an archetype of European tradition and triggers an unexpected acoustic waterfall. Accompanied by Dvořák’s Symphony No. 9 “From the New World”, an astonishing widescreen image unfolds before us, as if from The Wizard of Oz. Dang enters a sleek, modern living room and then a dining area, where, above a rectangular table, dominates the most expensive painting ever auctioned by Emil Filla. In the acoustic elegance reminiscent of Haneke’s Funny Games opening sequence, he sits down at the table and, in flawless Czech, wishes his family “dobrou chuť” — bon appétit. Then a quick montage: recycled Meissen porcelain (from Duchcov), color-contrasted svíčková sauce… everything rendered in the chromatic tradition that is so deeply engraved in our national memory that it cannot be erased. The visual design of his home intentionally draws inspiration from the former Josef Walter factory in Smíchov (Walter & Co.). That building once preserved the façade of classic industrial architecture, while its interior, especially the owner’s office, revealed the image of prosperity. Inside that gray industrial box in Smíchov, the castle of the factory owner lay imprisoned. The bitter reality outside could only be glimpsed through lavish stained-glass windows, whose blurred contours reflected the distant industrial landscape of truth. And this is how the world of the Vietnamese businessman will be framed. His world is like an ordinary Tatranka wafer, inside of which hides the most luxurious nugget of nougat.
Dang – The Vietnamese Market
The visual concept of the Vietnamese market will be formulated exactly as the general public perceives it: an overcrowded, soup-scented ghetto - a steamy refuge of Vietnamese asylum within our Central European culture. It is their world. A world that bothers no one. And so, the local inhabitant feels no sense of intrusion, no feeling that their home has been invaded by this distant culture. The few scattered “envoys” who appear within our society do not offend anyone. But the question remains — is that really so?
Our first glimpse into this unfamiliar world will come through the Vietnamese celebration. Even here, the difference will be striking compared to the usual public image of “street Vietnamese”, those sitting on cardboard boxes, eating from plastic containers. As if the whole thing were a deliberately staged illusion an exotic appetizer that fills the European viewer just enough to keep them from reaching the main course. The space of the Vietnamese celebration thus becomes that unknown world that follows after the appetizer.

Dang – Dang’s Car
It’s simply white. “What we are, are our memories, and that is where we are, and where we live.” In visual archetypes, black usually represents elegance, intellect, education, power, wealth, superiority, uniqueness, independence, and even a sense of respect born from danger. White, on the other hand, symbolizes celebration, marriage, peace, softness, the cliché of a journey into eternity, minimalism, and celestial purity. The head of the Vietnamese drug cartel, Dang, like any other affluent Vietnamese, Arab, or South American cartel boss, drives a white car.
Dang – Young Dang
The animation that rapidly unfolds Dang’s childhood serves here as a prologue. A prelude to our official entry into the “unknown” world of the Vietnamese community. To better understand Dang’s present-day actions, and to avoid perceiving everything as merely black and white I propose incorporating, in the form of animation, a brief visual passage through his past. A short story of a boy who came to Europe with his parents, who opened a small Asian bistro. Their goal was clear. Each of them knew back then that they would not easily be accepted by Central European society, and so, they had to build their own self-contained world. Besides, everyone likes Asian food, and when it’s cheap, people are happy to eat it every day. The parents’ future was concrete: to build wealth, so the next generation could move one step further. And the same applies to Dang. He already has some financial foundation, but to truly establish himself within society, more is needed.
As everywhere in the world - money means power. But being rich is not enough; one must become part of everyday life to graduate from prestigious local schools and gradually attain a socially respected position perhaps as a lawyer, doctor, architect, or artist. And of course, to speak the local language fluently. Dang grew up in a harsh environment, where selling illegal goods became a business opportunity. Risk brings profit. And the goal has long been set. Dang is, of course, a gangster in our legal and moral perception, but thanks to the fortune he has built, his children as the third or fourth generation can finally pursue a path of proper education. And that, ultimately, is what matters to him. Like his parents, Dang is acutely aware of the necessity of personal sacrifice for the sake of future generations. It’s a tremendous risk, but risk is gain and they have nothing to lose.
I believe he doesn’t care about our judgment, because from a historical perspective, no one will care anymore. Society simply has a short memory, yet for its entertainment it keeps returning to the same old themes, especially that idea of “justice”, which rarely looks toward the future. It’s a story not unlike that of Tomáš Baťa abroad. The company Baťa and simultaneously “not Baťa”, is now a globally recognized brand covering both the Italian and Indian markets, so deeply that no one even considers that it could be anything other than Italian or Indian footwear. But where is “Baťa” now? And where is our theory of what is right? There are many such examples. As a nation, we are capable of creating truly great values yet we destroy them with even greater passion. And so everything that was ever built eventually had to leave. All that remains is the power of the demonstrator a naïve protester holding a banner in one hand, waving a Tibetan flag with the other, while documenting everything on an iPhone made in China. We shout about who brings us shame, yet in truth, we don’t exist for anyone. We are locked within the heaviness of our open-air museum, repainting it over and over with the same color, and wiping it clean again through demonstrations. Ultimately, to question whether the great money financing this world comes from “clean” sources is naïve it only reveals ignorance of history. It’s all emotion - never reason.
Dang – Dang the Drug Kingpin and Dang the Developer
At the core and as the main driving force of RATS Zrádci lies Dang’s drug business. But just as the evolution of his life and the generations before him has been described, he himself likely no longer desires to be what he once was. It was all merely a journey the path of a kind of “greengrocer” who now owns a respectable bank. To reinforce the original idea, the desire to resist the traditional character of the television crime genre (a form I’ve never liked) and to find something more within it, it was necessary to change at least something, in detail or visual expression. To “damage” that conventional, tiresome narrative line of the criminal and, within the story, to accelerate the social evolution that the project is truly about. It would be pointless to wait for how it all turns out with the next generation. We can leave drugs in his past, as a closing annotation and instead clothe the present in a socially respectable suit. It is more alluring and provocatively subversive toward our cultural conventions. By recreating Dang as a developer, as the one who “builds our cities” a compelling image of the uncertainty in which we live has emerged. In the past, Dang merely filled a gap in the market and did so successfully creating capital to reach further goals. Now, he only needs to leave behind that immoral world and become the man who, quite literally, builds a new one for us. The former world of the drug kingpin packed away in a vegetable crate thus seamlessly transforms into the current life of a respectable developer. That developer is DANG Holding, which, according to his own words, has “been creating our world all along.” Our pursuit the desire to capture the man who lives off crime is devalued by the realization that we have long been part of his evil.
The “Woman,” the police officer, spends the whole time hunting someone whose world she already inhabits with her own family. The apartment she lives in, as suggested by the visual cues in the story, is likely one of his development projects. This game about truth, about who owns whom, and about how things really are becomes fully embodied in the apartment of his ex-wife. Hanka, Dang’s former wife, once a victim of drug addiction, now lives her rehabilitative life in a well-furnished space. That apartment comfortable for her, yet for an ordinary person more akin to a prison is nothing more than an illusion of a real home. A tangible example of illusion itself, the apartment was constructed by him as a set piece, built inside an unfinished building. We are thus watching the current past unfold within a present vision of the future. Are these things really what they seem? Or is everything, perhaps, a little different? It is difficult to be a judge in such contexts, when everyone has their own world, and in it, wishes to live according to their own desires.
Ill.Eg.All #2 – The Woman
Don’t have proof in your hand? Then create it so that you do. All it takes is to cut the existing story apart, rearrange it slightly in our own image, and give each of its pieces a new context. And so here, too, not everything that seems real is truly real…and not everything presented as truth actually is. Because sometimes what you see is only what someone wants you to see. The perception of the contemporary image has been stripped of the essential knowledge of context, reshaped only for comfortable reading. Who today is still taught to read the alphabet from the beginning? It’s enough for someone to utter a single letter, not “A”, and declare: “Here the story begins.” We judge without understanding the circumstances. We judge with emotion, not with reason. And because we are guided by fear, we prefer to remain silent. Yet somewhere deep within the soul, we know that none of it is really true. We deny and condemn the past while loudly proclaiming that only now, finally, everything is as it should be. Values long created, we lovingly desecrate in the newly painted image of today.
“…All that’s useless, castles shining, sacred temples, the very globe itself and all that it contains shall fade with it. And like this insubstantial pageant faded, leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep.” William Shakespeare, The Tempest / Prospero
So the question remains is there something else hidden behind it all? Something that, due to the shifting context of our time, has become almost unreadable? We are told that plastic straws are destroying the planet, so instead we move toward “greater recycling” in the form of rolling batteries. That’s absurd! We are victims of our own longing for comfort not for reason. Victims of those who feed on our “cheap desires.”- Money talks.
The world of the policewoman will be built upon two parallel lines that merge only at the very end, forming the image of today: professional life versus private life. In her professional life, this woman dives eagerly into the male world of the hunt yet in her private life, she hears no praise from her husband.
Why does her husband the man who should be the mirror of her life not answer when she silently asks: “Magic mirror in my hand, who is the fairest in the land?” Why does he keep building pointless confrontations, never understanding anything at all? And so, lost within her own world, she cannot find the answer: “My Queen, you are the fairest in the land.”
The image of their home life is formulated as a small apartment, with an entry hall and dining area that flows into the living room. The apartment is clearly meant only for living, not for working. There is no “desk” here, no space for her professional self. Throughout the domestic storyline, her husband keeps warning her about the danger of her job. This seemingly ordinary bit of television dialogue reveals its meaning only at the very end of the story. Because in her profession, the police twisting the truth often leads to success. So why not use that same skill at home? Thus, the original statement about the “unsuitability” of her profession, as a woman and mother of two is ultimately reframed as a restriction of her professional freedom. Everything is pulled out of context and, just like in her professional life, reformulated in her own image. And although a resolution appears to come, the story’s conclusion completely overturns it. Nothing is as it seems and she, blinded by her newfound power, becomes a puppet on strings, led by the real story into final helplessness.
This third segment, the story of one of the bearers of those ill egos - in truth resolves nothing. Though seemingly the main character, the heroine who by all convention should reveal the truth, she instead exposes only the emptiness of our serialized world. It is a story of an ego without an ending, and of all the characters, hers is the one that needs rehabilitation the most.
Ill.Eg.All #3 – David / A dream — and a not entirely clear goal.
David – Home / So Far So Close!
David’s story is built as a journey toward the realization of a childhood dream, and at the same time as a traditional Czech fairy tale, the story of Honza, who set out into the world to seek his fortune, only to discover in the end that the “fortune” he was searching for might have been at home all along. From birth, David lived with his parents in isolation, and every morning he walked a long road lined with a dense forest to get to school. His parents’ house was a small cottage by a lake, which, since the 1990s, had served as a family guesthouse — one of those once-popular “Zimmer frei” lodgings. One day, on his way to school, a hero appeared before him. At first glance, he was just an ordinary German tourist who had probably lost his way. But he arrived in a car that, in David’s forest world, shone like an apparition from another planet. The man drove a yellow Honda Prelude and wore a watch on his wrist. He was dressed in a leather jacket lined with fur, and on his feet were spotless white sneakers, without the slightest sign of wear. For David, this was a revelation a vision that offered him a way out of his forgotten world. He stands on the forest path as the yellow Prelude disappears into the distance.
This scene, not yet explicitly described in the screenplay, could help us better understand who David really is and why his world looks the way it does. Why he drives a yellow car, wears yellow clothes, and why he is constantly followed by a streak of yellow, like that road through the forest, always bordered by the surrounding landscape. Thus, this traditional archetype of the long, endless road through the woods becomes David’s future guide into a new world, but also his navigation back home. Wherever David goes, he always walks along a straight, clearly defined path. And just as with the previous character, Dang, these individual visual formulations give us a deeper understanding of David — allowing us to see beyond the surface of a man presented simply as a drug dealer condemned by society. Because things are not always what they seem.

David and the World of His Colors
David’s story is composed of three colors: yellow, white, and blue. No other colors significantly dominate his world. These predetermined hues shift in intensity as the story progresses: they lose saturation or, conversely, gain strength until they eventually consume the entire image. This visual transformation concerns the color blue most of all.
Yellow: The color yellow originates from the childhood experience already mentioned the moment when David saw his “apparition” in the form of a yellow Honda Prelude. That moment became the main driving force of the entire story. It represents the past, from which the color emerges, and today it is reflected in the color of his car, in small details of his clothing, and in the way he perceives the world around him. Beyond personal objects, yellow appears throughout his environment in a directional arrow on the floor, at a gas station, on an electric charging point, in a blinking traffic light, or on the tiled floor of a sanatorium. Just like any great enthusiasm, the intensity of this bright yellow gradually fades. By the end of the story, it remains only as a trace something that perhaps once was yellow.
Blue: As the euphoria slowly fades and complications begin to mount, the color blue quietly awakens.
Its climax comes at the point of David’s psychological breakdown when he reaches the very bottom and blue completely consumes the image. From this striking visual immersion, David eventually “resurfaces,” as if swimming through a watery world, back to where it all began to a puddle and a wet road leading to the house by the lake. And if not to the lake itself, then at least to something that might one day become one for now symbolized only by a flooded boat lying at the bottom of an otherwise dry ravine.
White: The role of white in David’s world carries a different meaning than it does in Dang’s. While for Dang it represents a reflection of reality, for David it functions as a tool for our understanding. David himself does not perceive the color white, it exists only for the viewer. I use it to emphasize emptiness the emptiness of a world David has not yet had the chance to discover. White thus becomes a metaphor for the unexplored, for what is still beyond his reach.This color-based visual concept allows us to understand David more deeply — to feel sympathy for him, to see beyond the label of a man preemptively condemned by society. Because even as a criminal, he can still be a traditional film hero.
David’s Apartment
David lives in a rented luxury apartment with several bedrooms, bathrooms, and one large minimalist kitchen that dominates the empty space like an artifact in a white gallery. Since David’s only dreams were to own a yellow car and an array of luxury sneakers, the kind without serial numbers, he uses his apartment in the same spirit. One room functions as a shoe gallery, another serves as a bedroom without a bed, and in the third, an empty TV box pro trudes meaninglessly into the room. In the living room, a television glows like a gaming altar, framed by a white sofa. The refrigerator is full of Coca-Cola, and the sink serves as a trash bin for plastic sushi containers. Otherwise, the apartment is empty and white. That entire sense of aimlessness and emptiness is underlined by the large kitchen which, in truth, isn’t even really there.
Additional Spaces
Beyond these three main worlds, there are smaller spaces that complete the picture:
• The policeman in a caravan
• The doctor in a sanatorium
• The windowless Vietnamese embassy
• The anti-narcotics police station inside a church
• The urban police headquarters in a new building without memory
• And the rural police station in a former grocery store.
The policeman in a caravan a man who could never be a family type. The doctor from the sanatorium a woman who knows no other home, and therefore could hardly ever connect with the man in the caravan. The Vietnamese embassy a world without windows, hiding something inside. The lonely absurdity of a church repurposed to fight drugs around the world. The police of today who have long lost the memory of darkness. And finally, the rural police station searching for a Western-style experience among the shelves of an old country store. Though these environments may seem insignificant, they carry a strong visual echo of fine art. The rural police station, in particular, is a recycled image of televised cowboy roughness, wrapped in the Texan absurdity of Elmgreen & Dragset’s Prada Marfa.