Jean Dujardin wears a Tissot Heritage Chronograph

OSS 117: Cairo, Nest of Spies (2006) gives its hero's watch a slow, admiring close-up, which is funny, because the hero is a complete idiot. Michel Hazanavicius built the film as a send-up of the old Bond-style spy picture, set in 1955 Cairo and played dead straight for laughs, with Jean Dujardin as Hubert Bonisseur de La Bath, agent OSS 117, a man as spectacularly incompetent as he is convinced of his own brilliance. The camera holds on his wrist anyway, the way you would frame a real spy's watch.

On it - and the shot makes sure I get a good look - is a Tissot Heritage Chronograph: polished steel, a cream stepped dial with three sunken registers, a single applied numeral at twelve, a date window tucked near four-thirty, and a coin-edge crown set between two pushers. It is exactly what a 1955 spy might have worn. It just isn't from 1955.

Tissot built the Heritage line in 2003, for its 150th anniversary, counting back to an 1853 founding, and styled it after its own mid-century chronographs. So Hubert's period-perfect spy watch is a 2003 tribute to the 1950s, worn in a 2006 film playing 1955 for laughs. Everybody in the frame is in costume, the watch included.