Bad acting in a movie poster

It should not possible to tell just from a single frame of any film that someone is not a good actor. Any emotion on an actor's face that is captured in a single moment could, in theory, be a correct response to whatever is happening in the film at that moment. We tend to judge acting as a failure to perform over several seconds of moving images, which establish the context of the acting. And rightly so. 

However, on a recent trip to the cinema, I decided that it might actually be possible.

I don't mind the actress Haley Bennett, who I have written about before because of her similarity in appearance to Jennifer Lawrence. There was something about her craft I initially didn't like, and I haven't loved a lot of the movies I've seen her in, but she is not a distraction, and I have liked her work at times.

However, in this movie -- which has a 2023 date on IMDB, so has really taken a long time to get here -- the expression on her face in this poster puts me back in the "nay" camp for Haley Bennett.

Here, I took a picture, I'll give you a closer look:

It's not much of an expression, but I would argue it tells us a lot.

It tells us that Bennett thinks the pursing her lips together and looking into the middle distance is her idea of how to play a prim and proper woman in the 18th century. Even though we don't know what she's looking at, from the context of the rest of the poster, it looks like she's not looking at anything, especially since her hands are involved in something else entirely.

I have since learned that "something else" has to do with the production of champagne, as that's what the real version of the title character actually did. She appears to have her hands in a basket of grapes, which is not something you would ordinarily be doing while staring off profoundly and contemplating your life. 

It's hard for me to know if this is an actual shot from the movie -- posters often aren't -- but if it is, maybe I should be calling it bad directing in a movie poster. Maybe then it is Thomas Napper I should blame, not Haley Bennett.

And maybe this was a stupid reason to write a post at all. This one image is probably not indicative of Bennett's performance in the slightest. 

But the fact that a reasonable person, such as myself, should even get a vibe that an actor might not be great at their job, from just a single image, means that someone, somewhere, is not doing something right.