Audrey Tautou wears an unidentified watch

Late in The Da Vinci Code, in a dim interior, Audrey Tautou's Sophie Neveu raises her right hand to her forehead, and the motion lifts her watch into the only patch of light in the frame. Sophie is the French police cryptographer pulled into a murder at the Louvre and the riddles its dying curator leaves behind, and Tautou plays her opposite Tom Hanks as a problem-solver first, a woman Ron Howard's camera trusts to think rather than to pose. The whole film is two and a half hours of people reading hidden meaning into surfaces.

The watch is the one surface that refuses to give anything up. It is a small rectangular dress watch, slightly taller than it is wide, with a thin polished bezel, a pale mother-of-pearl dial carrying faint colored printing, and a dark leather strap, a quiet accessory on a quiet professional. No logo or model name ever resolves on screen. In a story obsessed with decoding what is hidden in plain sight, the watch on the cryptographer's own wrist stays politely, stubbornly unreadable.