Teresa Reviews Portrait (2018)

Teresa reviews Portrait (2018), a 29-minute student adaptation of Five Little Pigs and marveled at how it succeeded in condensing the novel.

(c)2024 by Teresa Peschel

Fidelity to text: 4 beer bottles

Considering the plot was boiled down to six people, including the detective, it’s amazing how closely it follows the text.

Quality of film: 3½ beer bottles

Static, stagy, and with a strong feeling of a stage play moved to the screen. But it’s a 29-minute-long student film, so give it some credit.

Read more of Teresa’s Agatha Christie movie reviews at Peschel Press.

Also, follow Teresa’s discussion of these movie on her podcast.

Portrait is my fourth version of Five Little Pigs, one of Agatha’s more amazing novels. The single murder took place 16 years before Carla, the daughter of Amyas and Caroline Crale, calls in Poirot to solve who really murdered her father. She doesn’t believe it’s her convicted mother, who died in prison. It’s a murder in retrospect, the novel’s original title.

Poirot interviews the survivors (the five little pigs in the title), other witnesses, and carefully considers what he’s told. Witness statements are contradictory, particularly about Caroline’s guilt. No other murders take place, unless you consider the death of a woman’s soul to be murder. It sounds bloodless, but it’s not. The survivors of the Crale family circle, while left alive, were deeply traumatized.

What Agatha was doing within the guise of a genre mystery novel was showing how no one truly understand what goes on within a marriage other than the spouses. An outsider, even one very close to the couple, doesn’t see the whole truth. It’s that truth that Poirot hones in on, even if it’s not spelled out in words of one syllable for us dumber readers.

He concludes that — based on Amyas Crale’s behavior — Amyas would enjoy his fling with his muse, paint like an inspired madman, and then go home to Caroline. No matter how exciting and beautiful the model, it’s Caroline who made his house a home, a refuge, a sanctuary where he could paint with the one person who understood how vital painting was to him. Despite cheating on Caroline (how much is unspecified but you don’t get the impression Elsa Greer was his first cookie/model) he would never leave her. Like his other inspiring models, he’d discard Elsa when he no longer needed her for the painting.

Caroline’s objection wasn’t about Amyas’ casual affairs; it was how cruelly he used his muses. But what people saw was Amyas’ infidelity, Caroline upset and angry, and the odd screaming match because they were both high-octane people with plenty of things to fight about, starting with her much-younger half-sister, Angela.

Miss Williams, governess to Angela, told Poirot that some people were so bonded as a couple that they had no room for anyone else, including their own children. A couple like that isn’t going to shatter easily.

The central, all-important relationship between Caroline and Amyas is why the complicated, intertwining recollections and motives of the witnesses could be boiled down into this 29-minute student film. That relationship is what’s presented here.

Bipasha (Angela and Carla Crale in one) remembers vividly the day her sister, Manini (Caroline Crale) was accused of murdering her husband, Aveek (Amyas Crale). Two other people were visiting the household at the time: Shantanu (Meredith and Philip Blake combined) and Aveek’s newest model and muse, Ramyani (Elsa Greer). The character of Miss Williams, the governess, is gone as is everyone else in the novel.

Poirot remains, renamed Pracheto Biswas.

Bipasha asks Biswas to Shantanu’s house and, unbeknownst to Shantanu, also asks Ramyani. She wants to figure out what really happened to her brother-in-law and her sister. She’s waited seven years to learn the truth of that day. She can’t believe her sister poisoned Aveek’s beer with rat poison but what else could have happened?

The foursome sit around the table and Biswas interviews them one at a time, while the other three listen and occasionally comment. The story of the past unfolds in reminiscences and flashbacks showing what happened on that fateful day and the equally fateful day leading up to the poisoning.

Every important point in the novel is there.

Aveek is a serious, well-regarded painter devoted to his art. &&&& Let’s mention “paintings by Tapas Choudhury” in the cast list so he retains his credit. &&& His wife, Manini, supports his artistic endeavors and tolerates his infidelities, as detailed by Shantanu. A regular problem between Aveek and Manini is her younger sister, Bispasha, visiting from her youth hostel. Bispasha and Aveek have the same relationship that Angela and Amyas do; they can get along and they can fight like cats and dogs. At one critical moment, when it’s revealed that Ranyani expects Aveek to divorce his wife, Bispasha throws an ashtray at Aveek like Angela threw a paperweight at Amyas.

Ramyani, the muse and homewrecker, remembers her lost love. She was the muse and inspiration Aveek had been waiting for. She understood him, supported him, inspired him, and all in a manner that his middle-class bourgeois wife could not. Make sure to notice her class consciousness! Wherever Ramyani is from, she despises Manini as being not nearly good enough for Aveek. In fact, Manini, being a stodgy common housewife, couldn’t possibly understand or love an artist the way she can.

Biswas listens to everyone speak, asking questions to draw out further recollections.

We see in flashback when Ramyani tells Manini, Bispasha, and Shantanu that she’ll swiftly replace the tacky décor and uncomfortable furniture the minute she and Aveek are married. After he divorces Manini, of course. We watch Bispasha throw the ashtray at Aveek. We watch as Ramyani and Shantanu eavesdrop on Aveek and Manini fighting over … it sounds like they’re fighting over Ramyani’s presence in the house, but, as Biswas proves via pure logic and the psychology of the people, it’s about sending Bispasha back to her youth hostel. Then, in the morning of the fatal day, Manini sees Bispasha with a bottle of beer.

Swiftly, the layers of misconceptions are swept away. Shantanu reveals what he did not state in court (like what Miss Williams didn’t reveal): He saw Manini wipe fingerprints off the fateful bottle of beer.

Biswas, like Poirot, knows. The only reason Manini would wipe fingerprints from the beer bottle is if she thinks that’s where the poison is; the poison Bispasha put there to get back at Aveek for his cruelty to her sister. After announcing his death, Manini swiftly sends her sister away.

But there was no rat poison in the beer bottle. It was all in the glass. Since Manini didn’t do it, who was left? Bispasha is cleared. Shantanu, who had his own possible motive for murdering Aveek is likewise cleared by Biswas.

That leaves Ramyani. She admits it too, along with confessing that she killed her own soul that day. She was furious when she eavesdropped and heard the awful truth. Aveek was using her, planned to discard her like a used paint rag when he was finished, and the despised Manini objected to his casual cruelty of a girl who didn’t know any better.

Biswas recorded the conversation and tells the group that he’ll turn it over to the proper authorities to possibly clear Manini’s name.

Ramyani, like Elsa Greer in all her incarnations, no longer cares. She murdered three people that day. Her lover whom she learned she couldn’t live without. Her lover’s wife who escaped to be reunited with her husband. And herself, who had to live with what she did.

Everything you want from Five Little Pigs is here in 29 minutes.