Rachel McAdams wears a Bulgari Serpenti Tubogas

Brian De Palma's Passion (2013) is a remake of Alain Corneau's French thriller Love Crime, moved from Paris to Berlin, with Rachel McAdams as Christine, an advertising executive whose mentorship of her protege Isabelle, played by Noomi Rapace, curdles into sabotage. The costume designer, Karen Muller Serreau, dressed Christine in Dior and Bulgari to read as a scheming, ambitious executive with something of Katharine Hepburn's poise, and the watch is part of that armor: a Bulgari Serpenti, the coiled Tubogas version that wraps three times around the wrist. Tubogas is an old Bulgari technique, strips of metal wound around a core that is then removed, leaving a hollow, flexible band that needs no solder and no clasp; the Serpenti line itself goes back to 1948, when the watch hid in the head of a coiled snake. In the frame, Christine stands in a dim office with her hands pulled to her chest and hard slats of blind-light across the wall, the coiled metal catching the light on her left wrist. It is the kind of watch a character who weaponizes taste would choose, the sort of thing that announces a hierarchy across a room before she has said a word.