Sarah Michelle Gellar wears a Cartier Panthère de Cartier

Kathryn Merteuil raises a pair of binoculars in a wood-paneled room, her stepbrother Sebastian at her shoulder, and a Cartier sits on the wrist she lifts to her eyes. Sarah Michelle Gellar plays Kathryn as an Upper East Side socialite who runs her cruelties from behind charity lunches and good manners. The film, Roger Kumble's 1999 reworking of Choderlos de Laclos's Les Liaisons dangereuses, turns on a wager she strikes with Sebastian over the seduction of their headmaster's daughter.

On screen the brand is unmistakable, a square-cased Cartier with a pale dial and a fine link bracelet. The model is less settled. One catalogue calls it a Panthere de Cartier, the square bracelet watch Cartier introduced in 1983, while another logs it as a Tank Francaise. The case proportions and the close-set links favor the Panthere, but neither identification comes from a source strong enough to settle it, and the dial never holds still long enough to read its numerals. The watch stays a Cartier, with the Panthere the likelier of the two.