Nick Cheung wears a Memorigin Tourbillon

Integrity is a Hong Kong thriller about the city's anti-corruption agency, the ICAC, working a cigarette-smuggling and money-laundering case. Alan Mak directed it, the same Alan Mak who co-wrote and co-directed Infernal Affairs, the cop thriller Scorsese remade as The Departed. Somewhere in the last act, the camera lingers on the watch on Nick Cheung's wrist, long enough that the French magazine that wrote it up called it what it plainly is: product placement. The watch is a Memorigin.

Memorigin is Hong Kong's first tourbillon brand. William Shum founded it in 2011 to build the most complicated thing in watchmaking, the tourbillon, at a price that was not Swiss. The tourbillon, patented by Abraham-Louis Breguet in 1801, mounts the escapement in a tiny rotating cage to average out gravity's pull on the watch's accuracy, and for two centuries it belonged to the most expensive watches on earth. Memorigin's first model sold for around 3,800 dollars, where a Swiss tourbillon starts in the tens of thousands. The watch the camera lingered on, in a Hong Kong film about Hong Kong's own anti-graft agency, was a Hong Kong tourbillon.