Dany Boon wears a Beran Armee d'Afrique

Jean-Pierre Jeunet builds his Paris out of salvage. In Micmacs (2009), Dany Boon plays Bazil, a video-store clerk who takes a stray bullet to the head, loses his job and his apartment, and falls in with a band of junkyard scavengers who rebuild other people's scrap into elaborate contraptions. From there he sets out to ruin the two arms manufacturers behind the bullet in his skull and the landmine that killed his father.

The watch identified with Bazil is a Beran 'Armee d'Afrique', a small vintage French wristwatch from the middle of the last century. It is manual wind, with Arabic numerals, a sub-seconds dial, and the words Ancre 15 Rubis on the face, the old French shorthand for a lever escapement running on fifteen jewels. Beran is an obscure marque, and the model surfaces today mostly in vintage dealers' listings.