Anne Hathaway wears a Bulgari Serpenti

Halfway through Locked Down, Linda sits at her laptop in a quiet London house, one hand to her chin, listening to a video call she has clearly stopped caring about. The camera lingers on the wrist she has raised to her face, and a gold watch catches the warm light, a coiled bracelet that wraps the wrist several times with a small dark dial almost lost inside the metalwork. It is a Bulgari Serpenti, the house's snake-form jewelry watch, and it reads on screen exactly as Bulgari intended, as jewelry first and a timepiece second.

Doug Liman shot the film in about eighteen days in London in the autumn of 2020, with a skeleton crew working under pandemic restrictions, from a script by Steven Knight. The premise is a chamber piece with a heist bolted on: Anne Hathaway and Chiwetel Ejiofor play Linda and Paxton, an estranged couple stuck in the same house through lockdown who decide, half out of boredom and half out of desperation, to steal a diamond from an empty Harrods. Linda runs a fashion company, and for the first stretch we watch her perform composure on a stream of video calls, dressed for an office nobody is going to. With no red carpet and no boardroom, just a woman at a kitchen table, the watch on her wrist carries most of the costume weight.

Bulgari built the Serpenti around the Tubogas snake-coil bracelet it had been making since the middle of the twentieth century, the wound-gold silhouette that has been the house's signature jewelry-watch motif ever since. It suits Linda, and there is a private joke in the suiting: Hathaway is a longtime Bulgari ambassador who has worn the Serpenti on real red carpets, so a Bulgari face wearing a Bulgari snake in the film sits right on the line between costume and campaign. The dial is too soft to read down to a model, which hardly matters for a watch meant to be seen rather than consulted.