Jessica Biel wears a Geneva

Lee Tamahori's Next turns on Nicolas Cage's Cris Johnson, a small-time Las Vegas magician who can see two minutes into his own future while the FBI hunts him to stop a nuclear attack. Jessica Biel plays Liz Cooper, the schoolteacher who becomes his unlikely anchor, and at one point the camera settles into a warm, sunlit close-up of her wrist. The watch it finds is about as far from special as a watch gets: a slim silver-tone case on a brown croc-embossed leather strap, a cream dial, full Arabic numerals, thin dark hands. Printed under the twelve, in plain serif capitals, is the only name it offers, GENEVA, with QUARTZ and WATER RESISTANT stacked above the six.

Geneva is not a Swiss maison but a generic American fashion label, the kind of watch sold at department stores and mall kiosks, borrowing the prestige of a city it has nothing to do with. There is no model and no reference, because watches like this never carry one. And there is a quiet joke in the casting of it: in a film whose whole premise is the manipulation of time, the one watch the audience gets a clear look at is a cheap quartz keeping perfectly ordinary time, on the one person in the story with no special claim on it.