Marc Lavoine wears a Rolex Explorer

Marc Esposito's Le Coeur des hommes follows four longtime friends in their forties through a year of marriages, affairs, and the long conversations men have when they are avoiding the harder ones. Marc Lavoine plays Alex, who runs a sports-magazine publishing house with his friend Jeff (Gerard Darmon) and cheats on his wife Nanou without much guilt, including with one of their own employees. Jean-Pierre Darroussin plays Manu and Bernard Campan plays Antoine, the other two of the four. Most of the film happens in conversation, in bars, at the gym, over dinner, with the women in their lives steadily complicating the plans they make for themselves.

Esposito gives Alex a Rolex Explorer, worn on his right wrist, and keeps it on him through the 2007 sequel as well. The Explorer is the plainest of Rolex's sports watches. Rolex launched it in 1953 and tied it to that year's first ascent of Everest, an expedition it had supplied with Oyster Perpetuals, and built it around a 36mm case and a black dial with 3, 6 and 9 numerals chosen for legibility. There is no date, no rotating bezel, nothing to turn or read but the time. The single account of the watch gives no reference, and no clear shot of the dial settles whether it is the 14270 or the later 114270 that would have been current in 2003, so it stays an Explorer without a confirmed model.