À La Française

As modernity evolves, so does the Cartier Tank Française, now updated with a sleeker aesthetic while retaining its immutable Parisian identity.

- HO YUN KUAN

The opening scene of Guy Ritchie’s latest masterpiece begins with American actor Rami Malek standing by the iconic Pont Alexandre III bridge in Paris. A jaunty jazz piano number—’Lillies of the Valley’ by Jun Miyake—plays as he checks the time on his watch.

A stainless-steel Cartier Tank Française. Malek then gets on the bridge and begins crossing the river Seine.

Suddenly, he’s transported back in time. How do we know that? Because he crosses paths with a young Catherine Deneuve. She turns back to look at him as she passes; he whips out a digital camera and tries to capture a shot of the French screen legend. The camera flash blinds us for a split second. When the scene returns, the camera in Malek’s hands has been replaced by a vintage model with an oversized flash bulb. He lowers the camera slowly, still in disbelief, as he recognises the image in the viewfinder: Deneuve again, but this time, in her role as Geneviève Émery in The Umbrellas of Cherbourg. Malek has presumably been transported further back in time to 1964, the year the film was released.