Tom Berenger wears a Breitling Chronomat

Wolfgang Petersen directed Das Boot in 1981 and spent the next decade looking for a Hollywood foothold. Shattered was his third English-language film, a 98-minute amnesia thriller about an architect who wakes from a car crash with a reconstructed face and no memory. Bob Hoskins plays the private detective helping him piece things together. Greta Scacchi plays the wife. Joanne Whalley is involved. The premise borrows from every noir identity puzzle since Hitchcock, and Petersen, who knew how to build tension inside a submarine, handles the claustrophobia of not knowing your own life with similar patience.

The Breitling Chronomat on Berenger's wrist dates from the model's second life. Breitling relaunched it in 1984 with rider tabs on the bezel and a partnership with the Frecce Tricolori, the Italian air force aerobatic team. The relaunch pulled Breitling back from near-extinction during the quartz crisis. By 1991, the Chronomat was the brand's flagship. On Dan Merrick, it is an artifact of the man he used to be: successful enough to own one, unable to remember what it meant to him. His face was rebuilt by surgeons. The watch is the one thing that came through the crash unchanged.