Dany Boon wears a F.P. Journe Resonance

In a restaurant scene in La Ch'tite Famille (2018), Dany Boon's hand reaches past a beer glass toward the pepper mill, and the frame holds long enough to read the watch on his wrist: a round case in pale metal, a dark dial carrying two silver registers side by side, a black leather strap. That twin-display face is one watch people recognize on sight, the F.P. Journe Chronometre a Resonance, and the French watch site Montres de Luxe named this one as the Resonance Black Label. The provenance is the best part. "Il s'agit de la montre personnelle de l'acteur," the site noted: it is the actor's own watch, Boon having been a discreet collector of fine watchmaking for years and a devoted Journe enthusiast, and the appearance was "en aucun cas" a product placement. A French watch channel that later filmed Boon's collection found the Resonance sitting beside a Paul Newman Daytona.

The machine on his wrist is genuinely strange. Francois-Paul Journe presented the first Resonance wristwatch in 2000, working from the phenomenon Christiaan Huygens described in 1665, when he noticed two pendulum clocks on the same wall falling into step. Journe set two complete, independent balances close together on one plate so that they discipline each other through natural resonance, with no mechanical connection between them. His company calls it the only wristwatch in the world that runs on the phenomenon, and the trick had eluded watchmakers until Journe made it work in 1999.

Boon directed and co-wrote the film and stars as Valentin D., a celebrated designer-architect preparing a retrospective at the Palais de Tokyo with his partner Constance Brandt while hiding his working-class family in the North. The family arrives unannounced on opening day, and a car accident soon leaves Valentin convinced he is seventeen years old again. The film opened in France on February 28, 2018. Constance, for her part, wears what the same French site identified as a Jaeger-LeCoultre Reverso, which gives this comedy about an invented life two of the more serious watches in French cinema that year.