Bernard Tapie wears a Hublot Classic

Casting Bernard Tapie was either a joke or a masterstroke, depending on your tolerance for French self-mythology. Claude Lelouch's Hommes, femmes: mode d'emploi gives the real-life businessman, who by 1996 had already been indicted for corruption and match-fixing, the role of Benoit Blanc, a famous and ethically flexible entrepreneur who bonds with a hypochondriac cop (Fabrice Luchini) over their stomach troubles. Tapie is essentially playing himself with the serial numbers filed off, grinning his way through it like a man who knows the audience is in on the joke.

A watch-spotting site identifies the watch on Tapie's wrist as a Hublot from the Classic line, the original Hublot that Carlo Crocco designed in 1980. Crocco's idea was to pair a gold case with a natural rubber strap, a combination no one in the Swiss industry had tried and that many dismissed as vulgar. By the mid-1990s the Classic had found its audience among Mediterranean businessmen, politicians, and people who spent their time on yachts, which makes it an apt fit for Tapie: a man who made and lost fortunes, owned Olympique de Marseille, went to prison, and came back.