Michel Blanc wears a F.P. Journe Octa Calendrier Black Label

Johanna Pasquali is a scattered, clumsy police officer who dreams of joining RAID, the French national police's elite tactical unit, and in Dany Boon's Raid dingue (2017, released internationally as R.A.I.D. Special Unit) she finally gets her shot at the training program. What she does not know is that her father arranged it. Michel Blanc plays Jacques Pasquali, France's Interior Minister, who pulls strings to get his daughter admitted as a trainee on the condition that his involvement stays secret. Boon, who directed and co-wrote, plays Eugène Froissard, the RAID veteran saddled with her, a man whose wife has just left him for his brother.

The French site Montres-de-Luxe spotted something on the minister's wrist that has no business in a broad farce: an F.P. Journe Octa Calendrier Black Label in platinum. The Black Label series is sold only in F.P. Journe's own boutiques. Under the blackened gold and silver guilloché of the dial runs an annual calendar that advances itself through every month of 29, 30, or 31 days, asking for a hand just once a year at the end of February, and the automatic movement keeps its precision for 120 hours fully wound. No second source has ever documented the watch, and the available stills keep the minister's wrists out of frame, so the identification rests on the one French report.

Blanc was comedy royalty cast as the straight man. He co-founded Le Splendid, the Paris troupe behind Les Bronzés, and played the awkward bachelor Jean-Claude Dusse in the original 1978 film; in 1986 he took the Best Actor prize at Cannes for Tenue de Soirée, sharing it with Bob Hoskins. Raid dingue, a Pathé production that earned $36.4 million, came four decades into that career. Blanc died in Paris in October 2024, at 72.