Lily James wears an unidentified watch

Here is one of the strangest things about Rebecca, Daphne du Maurier's novel and the 2020 film Ben Wheatley made of it. The heroine has no name. She narrates the whole story, she marries into one of the grandest houses in England, and we are never once told what to call her. In the credits she is simply the second Mrs. de Winter, and Lily James plays her. In this scene she is curled into an armchair with her husband Maxim, played by Armie Hammer, one arm looped behind his head, a floral day dress, her whole posture young and a little unsure. On the wrist behind his neck is a watch.

It is a small one, the kind made for a woman's wrist in the 1930s, a slim rectangular gold case in an Art Deco shape on a thin black patent strap that nearly vanishes against his collar. You can just make out the little gold tank of it as her hand cradles his head. It is elegant and entirely of its period, and it is also a mystery. Nobody has put a name to it.

Which is a quiet joke the film does not know it is telling. Chopard dressed Rebecca, lending watches and jewelry across the cast, and the records are specific, the rose-gold necklace and earrings on Lily James in the film's big dramatic scene, the L.U.C dress watch on Armie Hammer's wrist. Everyone of consequence got a documented piece. The one watch nobody wrote down is the little gold one on the woman who never gets a name. She spends the whole story being defined by other people, by her husband and by the dead first wife whose initial is stamped on everything at Manderley. Her watch does the same thing. It keeps perfect time and gives up no name at all.