Michel Subor wears a Patek Philippe Calatrava

Louis Trebor lives alone in the forest near the French-Swiss border, and his heart is failing. In The Intruder (2004), Claire Denis gives the part to Michel Subor and follows him as he buys a replacement heart through channels the film never explains, then leaves for Tahiti and South Korea to find a son he long ago abandoned. Denis and her writing partner Jean-Pol Fargeau drew the story from a short essay by the philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy, who had written about his own heart transplant, and the film moves more by image and sensation than by plot.

Subor's own history is part of what Denis is using. Godard had cast him as the lead in Le Petit Soldat, shot in 1960, and Denis herself had brought him into Beau Travail in 1999. By the time he plays Trebor, his face reads as a record of postwar French cinema.

The watch is harder to pin down. A single French site, Montres de Luxe, calls Trebor's watch a Patek Philippe 5127R in rose gold, but it shows no screenshot or other evidence, no other publication repeats the claim, and the watch is never clearly visible on screen. The reference creates its own problem: Patek introduced the 5127 in 2005, after the film was shot and premiered at Venice in 2004, so that exact watch could not have been on Subor's wrist. What can fairly be said is only that the model named belongs to the Calatrava line, Patek Philippe's plain round dress watch, and that even the brand rests here on a single uncorroborated source.