From serial killer to white savior: Fourth sequel in the Czech movie franchise "Bastards" shows its protagonist at peak messiah complex

Actor, director and screenwriter Tomáš Magnusek’s pathological artistry has had the opportunity to mature for 10 years and has achieved a completely new dimension with the fourth sequel, subtitled “Reparation” (Reparát). The plot starts with now ex-teacher Tomáš Majer (played by Magnusek) having been in prison for 10 years for his brutal murders of three pupils at a special primary school.

There is no doubt that Majer perpetrated the murders, not from the perspective of the audience and not from the perspectives of the characters in the story. When we last left him at the end of the third sequel, all he regretted was that he threw one of the kids over a railing before he could “enjoy” him.

The fourth movie opens with Majer having been pardoned by the President and released. Outside the prison gates, his former schoolmate Ivan (played by Romani actor Zdeněk Godla) is waiting for him, and to Majer’s surprise, takes him in.

Ivan brings Majer home to protect him from the anger of those in the Romani community who want revenge. He explains that only Majer can save the Roma from the malevolent closure of the special school and the reallocation of the children attending it to mainstream instruction.

The special school was closed after Majer murdered three of its pupils, but Ivan wants to reopen it. Both men visit the special school’s former pupils, who are adults by now, and convince them that Ivan and Majer should be entrusted with teaching their children.

At the same time, Majer is being followed by the gang of Jiří Krampol (whose grandson he murdered). The gangster is living as a “sleeper” agent in a retirement home, even though he is apparently still running his criminal organization from there.

A wronged little soul

The “Bastards” series is a fascinating phenomenon. It would be a shame to dismiss it as merely the product of monstrous racism or filmmaking incompetence on a scale that is unprecedented, although it is both.

First and foremost, however, it is the product of Magnusek’s untamed ego. In fact, it’s almost magical.

When you think about it, that is the point of the franchise. “Bastards I” was most attached to scenes of children disrespecting teachers, talking back to them in vulgar terms and not taking their advice.

Nobody in the movie addresses whether the teachers deserve respect; the narrative focuses just on the trauma of people who believe they should be in a position of authority, but fail to earn it. One could even say that Magnusek manages to convey this single emotion (which he experienced as an educator himself in real life) in a relatively functional way at some moments.

In “Bastards I”, the murder of Majer’s sister motivated his revenge killings and can be seen as a metaphorical extension of his fear of losing control. That reading of the movie is the most sympathetic one possible, as it patronizingly admits of a scenario in which Magnusek’s intention was not just straightforward racism.

Naturally, nowhere in the Czech Republic do Romani children terrorize their fellow citizens to a degree that is anywhere near comparable to the world created by the “Bastards” movies. If, therefore, we want to believe Magnusek is not simply spreading deceptive racism, we have to presume these movies are a hyperbole that is intentional and not meant to be taken literally.

The first movie was reprehensibly irresponsible, imprudent, impractical and selfish. To repeat this in three more movies is beyond all comprehension.

Despite all of this, the franchise’s main message is not racism. The entire agenda of segregation is absolutely vague, never explained properly, and the movies frequently contradict each other.

In previous sequels, the ghettoization of the Roma is called a mistake, and Magnusek hints several times that he comprehends the essence of this problem as systemic. Nevertheless, in the fourth sequel, the protagonists precisely strive to keep “their” children from encountering “normal” youth.

In these movies, being Romani is placed alongside being mentally disabled without any clear key for differentiation, without identifying the criteria upon which such a classification should be based. There is certainly a debate to be had in society about where the boundaries lie for adolescents whose “special needs” prevent them from learning in a mainstream setting.

How, though, can such a discussion be held on the basis of the assumption that if you include children of Romani origin in a “normal” class, it is quite likely they will rape and murder your sister? Such artistic license is ill-considered, recklessly so, and is simply destructive to the message of the movie – if we are even willing to consider it hyperbole in the first place.

It is not at all clear what Magnusek thinks education and coexistence with Romani people in general should look like, even though he’s had some five hours of footage and 13 years to squeeze out a thesis. The fulcrum of these movies is not a search for any answers to issues in society, but the injustice presumably done to their protagonist – he is portrayed as absolutely right, yet he cannot be appreciated or listened to by the world around him.

Majer is portrayed as concerned with teaching children – but if Magnusek were a baker, then even the correct ratio of flour to sugar in his cake recipe would be in just as much of a conflict. The “Bastards” movies are not interested in depicting problems, and their racism is basically an unfortunate accident.

The sequels started making down payments on different arguments. These arguments are not, however, on issues of social subjects, they are the kind of arguments that defend the existence of the first “Bastards” movie and of Magnusek himself.

The franchise has started to become quite “meta”. “Bastards II“, and chiefly “Bastards III“, are adaptations, audiovisually and at feature film length, of the phrase: “I’m not a racist, but…”.

The movies continue to concentrate on depicting the frustration of their “hero” with children of Romani origin, but at the same time he punches out a proud Nazi who comes to express support to the murderer. Majer is not a Nazi, after all!

The protagonist just happens to be after the same thing as the Nazis. One of the three boys he murdered was even white, so this has nothing to do with skin color in the least – he’s just a decent Czech who sees what is happening around him and is not afraid to take action!

We know what’s going on here!

This recapitulation of the first three movies is necessary because the sparse story of “Bastards IV” takes on an unprecedented richness as long as we project everything we already know from outside it onto what we see onscreen. Magnusek encourages us to do so – the character of Majer walks out of prison wearing a green tank top with an image of the notorious criminal Jiří Kajínek, which he has never worn before and never wears afterward.

Is this a deliberate reference on the character’s part to Kajínek (who was at the movie’s premiere, by the way)? Why would the protagonist do that?

Godla, playing Ivan, recognizes the tank top and comments on it – so Kajínek exists in this fictional world, too. This is a clear signal that the movie’s reality and our own are intertwined.

Customarily one is cautious about equating a film’s protagonist with its author, but here it is absolutely apparent that Magnusek is conceiving of “Reparation” as a depiction of how his other movies were received. The work itself gets lost in this duality.

“Bastards IV: Reparation” is a truly epic culmination of the director’s messiah complex. The protagonist may be a brutal murderer, but he is depicted not just as the only person who can protect the Romani community from the rest of the world, but as the only one who can save them from themselves.

This is, above all, about insulting Romani people, about a racism that is not based on repugnance, but on a sense of superiority. It is equally proof of Magnusek’s ignorance of the activism of the thousands of white Czech men and women who are engaged in building the road to equality here.

If a caring Romani parent were to strive to reopen a closed school, those are the kinds of people who would certainly be his or her first choice as allies. In Magnusek’s world, though, there is no other hero than he himself.

His tactic is to pretend that the “rational” Roma all but consider Majer a folk hero who got rid of “a few bad apples” for them. The movie even attempts to convince the audience that Majer, when he was a teacher, had a brilliant relationship with his pupils and most of them have fond memories of him – which is absolutely absurd.

Magnusek has to be hoping that nobody in the audience will recall the previous movies (which, fortunately for him, is most probably true). He believes in his own exceptionalism, his own irreplaceability, and his own absolute goodness to such an extent that the character representing his values in these movies can be a brutal murderer without it tainting his personality.

Every time Majer allows himself to express regrets, several other characters shout him down and tell him that what he did was right. To comprehend the depths of Magnusek’s pathology, one must realize that in the original trilogy, the predominantly Romani children are drawn as so corrupt and evil that the character he played could murder them systematically while retaining sympathy within the story.

In “Reparation“, he then has Romani characters express gratitude for these murders and repeatedly declare him “one of them”. Godla’s character has even written to his sister, portrayed by model Gabriela Gášparová, so she can deliver the hint of a love affair with this protagonist 15 years her senior (and with somebody who looks like Magnusek).

Ivan also explains to Majer how much more clever he is than Ivan and how he wouldn’t be able to cope without him. Magnusek, therefore, has created a stupid Romani friend for himself in his own movie so he can become his mentor and role model.

This person has absolutely no sense of shame! He pays Romani actors and amateurs to flatter him, to recite a forgiveness he has written himself, and to excuse all his pretended regrets.

My eyes don’t hurt anymore, but my heart still does

In some places it is comical how little regard is paid in these movies to legality and to the logic of the plot. Even former Czech President Miloš Zeman would not have been so audacious as to have pardoned the murderer of three children.

The process of Majer’s release from prison is neither commented on in detail nor explained. We see meetings with his parole officers, who understandably tell him he is no longer allowed to teach, to associate with his former pupils, or to visit the building of the school.

Majer, however, does all of these things and even gives his auspices to the reopening of the institution quite publicly, but never faces any consequences for that. If a good storyteller found himself at such a dead end he would attempt to distract us and not draw attention to such lapses, but Magnusek puts them directly in front of us.

How absurd and alarming would it be for the authorities and society if such a serious criminal returned to the scene of his crime and established contact with the peers of his victims? The value of the murdered children’s lives is set to zero here, apparently there has been no palpable trauma among the members of the Romani community being depicted.

To comprehend this, all one has to do is recall the intensity with which Magnusek depicted the emotional strain of stressed-out teachers in the previous movies. The laxity of the Romani characters shows the depth of Magnusek’s lack of empathy for his fellow human beings and for society.

Majer encounters direct aggression only from characters drawn as being constantly in trouble themselves. The others greet him as if he is their best friend, a decent Romani man does not regret the deaths of a couple of “gypsy whelps” if it means he can ingratiate himself to the gadje [non-Roma].

None of the characters in the movie has an agenda, and none of them think like real people. We return to the idea that if Magnusek is telling his story with a certain degree of hyperbole, then it is not necessarily a mistake that his characters lack any realistic psychology.

However, even characters that are stylized need aims and motivations. This story, however, just attempts to rehabilitate its protagonist at any cost, a hero without an aim who is just waiting in distress to be betrayed and sacrificed for our sins (spoiler alert, sorry).

Magnusek is not competent enough to argue that he is depicting forgiveness as a fait accompli, as something unquestionable – his characters just have to express the right gratitude at the right time. “Bastards IV” does, however, represent a significant technical shift compared to the trilogy, which was below the level of even an amateur production.

In terms of craft, “Reparation” looks like a very bad professionally made movie, which is more than the audience familiar with Magnusek’s previous opus would expect. However, even if people were involved with the project this time who comprehend the principles of filming and audiovisual postproduction, that does not matter when the project is being led by a person with no filmic sensibility.

The overuse of music, the cluttered editing, the ugly colors and topsy-turvy performances (even Godla’s otherwise bottomless charisma seems static) all reign here too. This time, however, it doesn’t hurt the eyes anymore, so congratulations.

The “Bastards” movies are not and never have been so bad as to be entertaining. Certainly, there are a couple of crazy moments when viewers exchange amused glances with each other.

The entire plot line of Jiří Krampol waiting in his retirement home for an opportunity to enact his revenge is quite bizarre. There’s not enough of that kind of thing, though, for the movies to turn into some kind of cult midnight attraction.

For some audiences, “Bastards IV” might be riveting as the rarely seen self-revelation of an injudicious person lacking in talent, but is it actually worth an hour and a half of your life? There’s not much reason to let these bastards get upset anymore, let’s just let them fizzle out and disappear.