Jude Law wears an IWC Pilot's Watches

Late at night in a Manhattan cafe, Jeremy keeps a glass jar of keys behind the counter, left by people who walked out of relationships and never came back to collect them. He is played by Jude Law in My Blueberry Nights, the 2007 film that was Wong Kar-Wai's first in English. The story follows Elizabeth, played by the singer Norah Jones in her first acting role, on a cross-country drive away from her own heartbreak, with Rachel Weisz and Natalie Portman turning up in the towns she passes through. Jeremy and Elizabeth circle each other over slices of blueberry pie that nobody else orders, and that slow circling is the quiet center the rest of the film moves around.

On Law's wrist through those cafe scenes is the steel IWC Big Pilot, a watch that has no business being there and somehow belongs anyway. It is enormous, roughly 46mm across, with a flat black dial, big luminous numerals, and the conical onion crown that gives the model its silhouette. That design is not styling. The Big Pilot descends from the observer's watches IWC built to Germany's wartime B-Uhr specification, instruments sized for maximum legibility in a cockpit and for a crown a pilot could set without peeling off his flight gloves. It is an odd couple, an oversized aviation tool monstering the wrist of a man pouring coffee at three in the morning, and the effect is compelling rather than absurd. The watch is far too big for the job, which is exactly why it suits a character who collects the things other people leave behind.