Yvan Attal wears an IWC Portugieser

François Taillandier is an ordinary man whom a beautiful stranger, Chiara, has pulled into a life that was never his. Over an evening in Cannes she takes the heavy chronograph off her own wrist and gives it to him. It feels like intimacy and turns out to be a trap: alone in his hotel room, Taillandier turns the watch over and reads the engraving on the caseback, Anthony Zimmer, the name of the fugitive the police and the mafia have been hunting, the man the world now takes him to be.

The watch is an IWC Portugieser Chronograph, the 3714-series piece in steel, 40.9mm, with a black dial and white registers, the layout collectors call a reverse panda. Jérôme Salle, who directed and is a serious watch enthusiast, brought IWC in through a placement deal, and after the film IWC issued a small limited edition that carried the same Anthony Zimmer caseback engraving. The Portugieser line goes back to 1939, when two Portuguese merchants asked IWC for the accuracy of a marine chronometer on the wrist, and its large, clean dial has always worn bigger than its diameter suggests.