Jean Dujardin wears a Jaeger-LeCoultre Master Réserve de Marche

Two years before The Artist won them the Oscar, Michel Hazanavicius and Jean Dujardin were making spy comedies. OSS 117: Lost in Rio is the second of three, sending Dujardin's magnificently dim secret agent Hubert Bonisseur de la Bath to 1967 Brazil after a list of French Nazi collaborators. The joke is Hubert's total blindness to his own racism, vanity and incompetence, and Dujardin plays it with the timing of a silent comedian, the same physical gift Hazanavicius would build The Artist around.

On Hubert's wrist is a Jaeger-LeCoultre, the Master Réserve de Marche, a steel dress watch with a power-reserve hand that shows how much wind is left in the mainspring, worn on a brown alligator strap. It belongs to JLC's Master Control line, the family the manufacture launched in 1992 around its 1000 Hours Control, a run of tests each watch had to survive before it left Le Sentier. A modern watch, in other words, dressed to pass for 1967.

The series treats watches as costume from one film to the next. In the first OSS 117 Dujardin wore a Tissot, and in the third, in 2021, another Tissot. Rio is the entry that puts a Jaeger-LeCoultre on him instead.