Rashida Jones wears a Cartier Panthère de Cartier

On the Rocks turns on a watch. Sofia Coppola wrote and directed the 2020 film, in which Laura, a writer played by Rashida Jones, comes to suspect her husband Dean is having an affair and lets her charming, unreliable father Felix talk her into investigating. The thread that starts it all is a watch: Felix reports that Dean was seen at Cartier, on 52nd and 5th, and Laura assumes the worst.

The watch that clears him is a Cartier Panthère. It is the only watch Coppola actually scripted; Cartier offered the Panthère or the Tank, and she chose the Panthère, a design born in the 1980s with a sleek bracelet and a concealed clasp, worn over the years by the likes of Pierce Brosnan and Keith Richards. The version on screen is the two-tone steel and gold. Coppola knew it well: she wore a gold Panthère of her own throughout the shoot, a watch Cartier had given her in 2017 for directing the ad that relaunched the model.

It pays off in the last scene. Laura's birthday brings her two watches. Her father gives her a vintage tonneau-shaped Jaeger-LeCoultre, an old favorite of his she remembers from childhood, and her husband gives her the engraved Cartier Panthère. The Cartier is the one that matters to the plot: the trip to the jeweler that had looked like proof of an affair was Dean buying this.