Michael Fassbender wears an unidentified watch

Before Hunger and Inglourious Basterds, Michael Fassbender was taking parts like Esme in Francois Ozon's Angel (2007), an Edwardian period piece about a romance novelist (Romola Garai) who constructs her life as carefully as her fiction. Fassbender plays the struggling painter who becomes her husband. He's the artistic conscience she doesn't want, a man who paints for truth while she writes for money.

Fassbender wears a small round watch on a brown leather strap, visible when he's in his artist's shirtsleeves. The watch hasn't been identified, but it's period-appropriate for the early 1900s setting. Ozon, a French director making his first English-language film, treated Angel as deliberate melodrama — overripe sets, saturated colors, performances pitched somewhere between sincerity and camp. Fassbender plays it straight, which makes the watch feel like a prop for a character who doesn't belong in Angel's gilt-edged world.