Gérard Lanvin wears a Hamilton X-Wind

Secret défense, Philippe Haïm's 2008 thriller released internationally as Secrets of State, keeps close to the French foreign intelligence service, the DGSE, and its campaign against a terrorist network. Gérard Lanvin plays Alex, the officer who runs the service's counter-terrorism work, set against Al Barad, who runs the network on the other side. The film follows the people both men spend in that war, among them Diane, a student the service recruits. Much of it plays out in offices and safe houses, in the slow machinery of an agency at work rather than in chase sequences.

The identification comes from the French watch magazine Montres de Luxe, which ran a piece headlined that Lanvin wears a Hamilton X-Wind automatic. It is the only outlet to name the watch, which does not read clearly on screen, so the call rests on that single report. By the magazine's account the piece is a 44mm steel chronograph, water-resistant to 100 meters, with a sapphire crystal and a screw-down crown, worn on a rubber strap. Montres de Luxe counted it as Hamilton's third turn in French cinema in short order, after Hello Goodbye and Pour elle, a quick run of placements for the Swatch Group brand.

The X-Wind belongs to Hamilton's aviation line, which sits oddly on a man who runs his war from a desk and through other people rather than from any cockpit. The aviation tie is old company ground. Hamilton built much of its name supplying the United States military through the Second World War, when it dropped its consumer watches to make instruments for the armed forces, and it has stayed close to flying since. Its watches reached the screen far earlier, back to the Art Deco dial in Shanghai Express in 1932.