Toni Servillo wears a Rolex Air-King

Jep Gambardella wrote one novel at twenty-six. It was brilliant, and he never wrote another. Instead he became the king of Rome's nightlife, and Paolo Sorrentino's The Great Beauty is about what is left of a man who spent forty years being charming instead of working. Sorrentino took the 2014 Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film with it, the first Italian winner in fifteen years.

On Jep's left wrist, through all of it, is a Rolex on a steel Oyster bracelet. What kind of Rolex is the question nobody can answer. Sorrentino keeps the watch in the frame and out of focus, so the people who study these things have split: the costume analysts at BAMF Style relay one reader's call of a steel Air-King, the plain time-only Rolex named in 1945 for RAF pilots, and another viewer's argument for a platinum Day-Date with an ice-blue dial, the most expensive watch the company makes.

That gap is wider than it sounds. One reading puts the cheapest Rolex in the catalog on a man surrounded by people performing their wealth, the plastic surgery and the parties on the terrace above the Colosseum. The other puts the grandest. On screen the watch stays blurred, and the question stays open.