Ewan McGregor wears an unidentified watch

In a sunlit London garden, Ewan McGregor's Ian leans in close and wraps an arm around his brother Terry, played by Colin Farrell, who sits hunched over in a denim shirt with his head bowed. It is a tender moment in a film with very little tenderness left in it. Cassandra's Dream is Woody Allen's 2007 London crime drama, the third of the films he shot in the city, and it puts the two Blaine brothers on a slow road toward murder. Ian wants to invest in California hotels and Terry is drowning in gambling debts, and their wealthy uncle Howard Swann, a plastic surgeon played by Tom Wilkinson, offers to clear their problems if they kill a former business partner who is about to testify against him. Hayley Atwell plays Angela, the actress Ian falls for and tries to impress, and Sally Hawkins plays Kate.

As Ian holds his brother, a steel-cased chronograph rides on his left wrist, worn on a steel link bracelet and half-tucked under his cuff. The dial is turned away from the camera and reads only as expensive steel, with no brand or model legible in the frame, which suits Ian exactly. He is a man performing a version of success he cannot quite afford, the sort who would put a sports chronograph on his wrist before he has the bank balance to match it.

There is a wrinkle worth knowing about this one. The watch has long circulated online as an Omega Seamaster, the dressier cousin of James Bond's diver, but that identification traces to a single French enthusiast site that names the watch without citing how it knows. No watch publication and no auction record corroborates it, and the dial in the film never gives up a logo. What we can say honestly is that Ian Blaine wears a steel chronograph, and that the Bond-watch story attached to it may be an illegible wrist and a confident guess. Off screen, McGregor is a genuine watch enthusiast who later spent years as a tester and ambassador for Bremont, which makes the gap between the man and his fictional striver feel almost like a private joke.