Richard Berry wears a Guy Ellia Time Space

A hotel room, mid-afternoon. Francois Pignon sits on the edge of the bed in his boxers and a fishing vest, looking like a man who has run out of reasons to keep going, while a few feet away Jean Milan stands in a black turtleneck with a leather belt in one hand and a job to finish. This is the setup of L'emmerdeur, the 2008 film Francis Veber directed as a remake of his own 1973 original. Richard Berry plays Milan, a contract killer who checks into the room next to Pignon to line up an assassination, and Patrick Timsit plays the suicidal Pignon, whose every interruption keeps the hit from happening. Veber has been telling versions of this joke for decades: a man who kills for a living stuck beside a man who cannot manage to die.

On Berry's left wrist, visible as he handles the belt and again when he recoils behind a rifle, is a round watch on a dark leather strap, a polished case with a quiet dial that reads as understated dress rather than anything a marksman would worry about catching the light. It is a Guy Ellia Time Space, a model from a tiny French maison that made very few watches, a circular, ultra-thin skeletonized design built around a Frederic Piguet movement, roughly 46.8mm across and under five millimeters thick. The circular shape is worth getting right, because this watch has been miscalled rectangular, and the rectangular Guy Ellia is the separate Time Square. The dial surrenders no brand at screen resolution, so it stays one careful step short of certain, and there is a small joke in that: Guy Ellia made so few watches that spotting one is nearly as hard as the gag at the center of the film is old.