Jean Dujardin wears a Chopard Mille Miglia

In 2015, Claude Lelouch sent Jean Dujardin to India. Dujardin plays Antoine Abeilard, a French film composer hired to write the score for a Bollywood retelling of Romeo and Juliet, and somewhere between the recording sessions and the diplomatic dinners he meets Anna, the wife of the French ambassador, played by Elsa Zylberstein. The two of them ride trains, wander markets, and eventually set off on a pilgrimage toward the Ganges. Lelouch had been making this kind of film, two people falling for each other at an inconvenient moment, for more than fifty years.

On Antoine's wrist for the journey is a Chopard Mille Miglia, reference 168511-3036. It is a 42mm steel chronograph, COSC-certified and automatic, made as a limited run of 2,014 pieces, with a matte beige dial marked in red, green, and black that borrows the look of a 1920s instrument panel. The name comes from the Mille Miglia, the old Italian road race; Chopard has been its timekeeper since 1988, and the connection runs deep enough that the line's usual rubber strap is stamped with the tread of a 1960s Dunlop tire. This particular reference trades that for topstitched brown Barenia calfskin.

The watch is a Chopard product placement, and not the first time the brand had dressed a Lelouch picture; it had done the same on his earlier film Salaud, on t'aime. Dujardin wears it through the whole trip, and it turns up again in the film's promotional art, the composer leaning out of a train carriage somewhere in India with the chronograph plain on his wrist.