Pierre Niney wears a Montblanc

Yann Gozlan's Black Box (Boite noire, 2021) puts Pierre Niney inside the Bureau of Enquiry and Analysis, the French agency that investigates plane crashes, as Mathieu Vasseur, a young black box analyst who comes to believe the cockpit recording from a fatal crash has been altered. The still on this record has him at the bureau, lanyard on, coffee in hand, facing down his boss, played by Andre Dussollier. The French watch site Montres-de-luxe identified the watch on his wrist at the brand level only: a Montblanc on a leather strap, model unnamed, and the film never gives the dial a close-up.

The brand makes sense on this actor. Niney was a Montblanc ambassador, and the same site logged him wearing a Montblanc Timewalker Date in Un homme ideal in 2015, a thriller directed by the same Yann Gozlan; he has since moved on to Omega. Montblanc the watchmaker is more serious than the pen-company reputation suggests: it acquired Minerva in 2006, a movement manufacture founded in Villeret in 1858 with real chronograph pedigree, and it sits inside Richemont alongside Cartier, IWC, and Jaeger-LeCoultre.