Kevin Spacey wears an IWC Portugieser

Inseparable (2011) was billed as the first wholly Chinese-financed film to headline a Hollywood star, with Kevin Spacey as Chuck, a mysterious American expatriate in China who befriends a depressed young engineer, Li, played by Daniel Wu. The director was Dayyan Eng, reportedly the first American to direct a Chinese feature, and the script borrows the unreliable-narrator structure of Fight Club, with Chuck possibly a figment of Li's mind. On a daytime walk along a riverside promenade, a cable-stay bridge behind them, Chuck holds a paper coffee cup and an IWC Portugieser chronograph sits on that wrist: a round steel case, navy-blue dial, twin sub-registers, slim leaf hands, on a black leather strap. The Portugieser descends from a 1939 IWC commission, when two Portuguese merchants wanted a wristwatch with the accuracy of a marine chronometer, which is why it has always worn an oversized, clean dial. Spacey did not just star in this one; his own Trigger Street Productions co-produced it, and the still's copyright sits with Trigger Street, so the watch is on a film he had a stake in, an IWC of a piece with the power-broker roles he tended to play.