Lambert Wilson wears an Omega Seamaster

In the summer of 1946, where Jérôme Salle's The Odyssey opens, Jacques-Yves Cousteau is a restless former naval officer living by the Mediterranean with his wife Simone and their two sons, Philippe and Jean-Michel. Lambert Wilson plays him across the next four decades, through the invention of the aqualung, the purchase of the research vessel Calypso, the voyages that turn him into an international celebrity, and the deepening conflict with his son Philippe over what progress was doing to the ocean. The watch on Wilson's wrist is an Omega Seamaster 300. Omega partnered with the film, and the choice is not an approximation: it is a watch the real Cousteau used.

The Seamaster 300 arrived in 1957, one of three sports watches Omega launched together that year alongside the Speedmaster and the Railmaster, and it was built to take on the Rolex Submariner. The reference Cousteau's team carried came a little later, either the no-date 165.024 or the date 166.024; even now collectors cannot always tell the two apart on screen. What is documented is the use. According to the Omega Museum, Cousteau's divers wore the Seamaster 300 during Precontinent II, the 1963 experiment in the Red Sea staged to prove that divers could live for long periods in a pressurized habitat on the sea floor.

Cousteau was, by the standards of his trade, a serial wearer of tool watches. Across his documentaries and dives he turned up in Rolex, in Doxa, in the French brand LIP, in Aquastar, and in several Omegas: the hulking Seamaster PloProf, the Seamaster 1000, a Marine Chronometer, and the Seamaster 300 the film hands Wilson. Salle does not dwell on any of it. Of all the brands a costume department could have chosen, it picked one the real Cousteau had genuinely worn underwater.