Kristin Davis wears a Cartier Tank

The frame on this record is the lakeside picnic: Mary Morrison and her new nanny Grace toasting wine at sunset, and on Mary's wrist, just past the cuff of her denim jacket, a small watch on a dark strap. Anna Elizabeth James wrote and directed Deadly Illusions, a Voltage Pictures thriller that Netflix released in 2021 and that climbed, over twelve days, to the top of the platform's trending list while critics and viewers argued about what they were watching. Kristin Davis plays Mary, a bestselling novelist who hires Grace to mind her children while she writes, and slowly loses the line between her fiction and her life. The French watch site Montres-de-luxe made the only published identification of her watch: a gold Cartier Tank on a leather strap with a deployant clasp. No other publication has weighed in, and the film never gives the dial a close-up, so the identification rests on that one call and on a profile, small and rectangular, that fits it.

The Tank itself needs less defense than the film. Louis Cartier designed it in 1917, taking the form from the Renault tanks of the Western Front, with the vertical sidebars, the brancards, standing in for the treads seen from above. It has been in continuous production for over a century. Andy Warhol owned one and claimed he never wound it, because he wore it as jewelry rather than as a timepiece.