Gérard Lanvin wears a Pulsar Accelerator

André Morales is a strait-laced retired captain of the gendarmerie, and in Papi Sitter (2020) he is stuck sharing a house, and a granddaughter, with a man he cannot stand. On his wrist is a Pulsar Accelerator, a quartz chronograph that costs less than 200 euros. The French watch magazine Montres de Luxe wrote the film up for exactly this. A retired gendarme, the editors reasoned, is more believable in a sub-200-euro chronograph than in a 10,000-euro one, and they turned the casting of the watch into a small lesson about choosing an actor's accessories well.

It is, by a distance, the cheapest watch Lanvin has worn on screen. Elsewhere in this record he appears in a Boucheron, a Zenith El Primero, and a Hamilton, none of which you could buy for the price of the Pulsar.

Pulsar did not begin as a budget brand. The first Pulsar was the Time Computer, the LED digital watch Hamilton showed as a prototype in 1970 and put on sale in 1972, the first all-electronic digital watch anyone had built. Hamilton lost the name to Seiko in 1978, and Pulsar has been a Seiko value label ever since. Twelve years before Papi Sitter, Lanvin wore a Hamilton X-Wind in Secrets of State. In this one, as a gendarme, he wears the brand Hamilton invented and then gave up.