Choi Min-sik wears a Montblanc

Oh Dae-su comes to on a grassy rooftop, fifteen years after he was sealed inside a single room with no charge and no explanation, and the first thing I notice is a watch he never put on his own wrist. Choi Min-sik plays him in Park Chan-wook's Oldboy (2003), a man who has owned nothing for fifteen years. His captor sedated him, hypnotized him, and dressed him in a new suit before turning him loose, and the watch came with the suit, pressed onto him like everything else he is wearing.

And it is a Montblanc, which is a small surprise. Montblanc made its name on pens, and for most of its life that's all the company was; it didn't start making watches until 1997, out of a workshop in Le Locle, Switzerland. The one on Dae-su's wrist is a plain steel dress watch: white dial, a full set of Arabic numerals, MONTBLANC printed under the twelve, the little star emblem on the crown, a date window down at six, leaf hands, black leather strap. No model name is readable, so the brand is as far as the frame lets me go.

The camera isn't really interested in the watch, though. It wants the back of his hand, inches away, where rows of hand-inked tally marks count off the time he spent inside. Fifteen years of keeping his own time by hand, and now there's a machine on his wrist doing it for him.