Simon Yam wears an unidentified watch

Early in Triangle, the three friends sit around a small bar table over a bowl of peanuts and an ashtray, broke and desperate for money. Triangle is a 2007 Hong Kong relay film: Tsui Hark shot the first half hour, passed the story to Ringo Lam, who passed it to Johnnie To, each director bringing his own writers and none of them sharing a script. The tagline runs one word to a segment, "Temptation. Jealousy. Destiny." It screened out of competition at Cannes that year.

Simon Yam plays Sam, the married one of the three. His friend Fei, played by Louis Koo, wants him to drive a getaway car for a robbery, and Sam backs out. The third friend, Mok, is an antique-shop owner played by Sun Honglei. Then a stranger leaves them a map to treasure buried under the Legislative Council building, and one late-night dig looks like it will settle every debt among them. It does the opposite. A crooked cop named Wen has been tracking the three, and Wen is sleeping with Sam's wife. The brotherhood comes apart and the treasure ends up in the wrong hands.

The watch is the part that will not resolve. In this shot Sam reaches across the table and his wrist comes up bare, while the only timepiece in the frame rides the wrist of the friend across from him: a steel sports watch on a steel bracelet, a heavy case catching the lamplight. The bar is dark and the glimpse is short, and the footage never gives up a dial or a legible marking. Sam wears nothing the camera can fix on, and the one watch it does catch keeps its name to itself.