Sylvain Marcel wears a Chopard L.U.C XPS Twist

Aline (2020) is Valérie Lemercier's film about Céline Dion, fictionalized just enough to rename everyone. Lemercier wrote it, directed it, and plays the singer as Aline Dieu, the fourteenth child of a musical Quebec family who grows into a superstar. Sylvain Marcel plays Guy-Claude Kamar, the stand-in for René Angélil: the manager, much older, who hears her voice, builds her career, and marries her.

Chopard partnered the Gaumont production, dressing the film in its jewelry and putting one of its watches on Guy-Claude's wrist. It is the L.U.C XPS Twist, from the haute-horlogerie line Chopard names for its founder, Louis-Ulysse Chopard. The Twist earns its name from a rotated movement, turned thirty degrees so the small-seconds dial sits at seven o'clock and the crown at four. It is a thin gold dress watch, forty millimetres across and just over seven millimetres thick, with a micro-rotor automatic behind a sapphire back. The Fairmined-gold version the watch press tied to the film was a 250-piece edition that sold for around eighteen thousand dollars.

Chopard's film work usually arrives on a red carpet. The house has been the official partner of the Cannes Film Festival since 1998, and it makes the Palme d'Or. In Aline it does something smaller: a thin gold dress watch on the manager's wrist, recorded by the brand and the French watch press rather than shown off in a close-up.