Natasha Richardson wears an unidentified watch

In a garden scene from The White Countess, Natasha Richardson's Countess Sofia Belinskya sits beside Ralph Fiennes's Todd Jackson, a blind former American diplomat who opens a Shanghai nightclub and names it for her. The club gives the film its title. A cream cloche hat shades her face, and the hand steadying her raised parasol turns her wrist toward the camera. Sofia is a Russian aristocrat who fled the 1917 Revolution and now dances with paying strangers in a Shanghai hall to keep her émigré family fed. Kazuo Ishiguro wrote the screenplay, and the year on screen is 1936.

On that wrist is a small round watch in pale metal on a scuffed brown leather strap. The dial is white enamel, the numerals are black Roman, and a small running-seconds register sits low on the face. The hands are blued steel, and the case hangs from the thin wire lugs the earliest wristwatches used. A maker's name runs in script below the center, too small and soft to read. The whole form belongs to the early wristwatch, the enamel-dial type of the 1910s and early 1920s, which makes it an old watch already by the film's 1936.

In the story, Sofia's relatives are already scrambling for papers and passage out, ahead of an invasion the film only foreshadows. The Battle of Shanghai began in August 1937, about a year past this garden afternoon.