Warm gold around a gray titanium hand is a deliberately awkward pairing, and it is the more interesting of the two ways the FFC is offered. In 18K 6N gold the case takes on a distinctly red cast, and the sculpted automaton inside it stays resolutely industrial, so the watch sets a decorative metal against a functional one and refuses to reconcile them. That tension suits the object. This is a watch that tells the hours by raising and folding the fingers of a mechanical hand, an idea that ought to be whimsical and is instead executed with complete seriousness, and the gold version wears that contradiction on the outside as well as the inside. The case is 42 mm across, the minutes turn on a rotating disc, and the calibre is a rebuilt 1300.3. It remains in current production.
Journe engraved the hand rather than leaving it plain, and in gold that decision reads differently than it does in platinum. The titanium is worked with tendons and knuckles and the suggestion of skin over bone, so the thing is a piece of sculpture as much as it is an indicator of the time, and against a warm case the gray of the metal looks colder and more anatomical than it does against a cool one. Everything around the hand has been stripped away to let it be seen properly. There is no dial in the conventional sense, only the open mechanism and a narrow ring at the perimeter that carries the minutes, turning on an extra-flat ball bearing beneath a fixed cursor at noon so the reading is taken where the ring passes the mark. The movement bridges are titanium finished with Titalyt, the same plasma oxidation treatment the manufacture applies to its Elegante cases, which keeps the visible architecture behind the hand in the same gray family as the hand itself. The case stands 10.7 mm tall despite everything packed inside it, which is no thicker than the manufacture's ordinary automatics, and the watch comes on a leather strap. Journe made no concession in the proportions to accommodate the automaton.
The instantaneous jump is the hardest single thing this watch does, and it repays understanding why that should be so. A hand showing four o'clock and a hand showing five o'clock are not one finger apart; the whole configuration reorganizes, several fingers moving simultaneously in different directions, and it has to happen at the top of the hour in a single motion rather than drifting across the minutes on either side. That means the mechanism has to store energy, hold it against a detent, and then release the whole of it at once, twelve times a day, without the release disturbing the rate of the watch by a measurable amount. Journe solved it with ten cams turning over a twelve-hour cycle, each finger following its own profile, with springs and toggles converting cam movement into finger movement and a steel sling carrying the motion out with as little friction as possible. The whole assembly runs to 396 parts and 63 jewels, or 436 parts once cased. Underneath all of it sits the Octa automatic architecture, its off-center 22K gold rotor winding in a single direction on a self-locking ball bearing, beating at 21,600 alternations per hour and holding a reserve of five days. The automaton draws on that same barrel; there is no separate power source anywhere in the watch.
Automata are old and watchmaking has made them before, but almost always as an accessory to timekeeping rather than as the timekeeping itself. The tradition runs through singing birds, through jaquemarts striking bells on the hour, and through erotic scenes concealed behind hinged covers, and in every one of those cases the animation is a performance the watch gives in addition to showing the hours. The FFC inverts that relationship completely. The automaton is not an additional entertainment; it is the hour hand, and if it fails the watch cannot tell you the time. That distinction is precisely why the piece belongs in a serious catalog rather than in a curiosity cabinet alongside the singing birds. It also fits Journe's own formula, the words invenit et fecit that appear on his dials, meaning invented and made: the claim is that the manufacture both conceives and executes, and a watch that indicates the hours by a method nobody had used before is about as literal a demonstration of it as could be arranged. The idea came from Francis Ford Coppola over a dinner in 2012, but the mechanism that answers it did not, and the seven years of development that followed were entirely the manufacture's own work.
Gold is the choice for the buyer who wants the FFC to read unmistakably as a luxury object as well as a mechanical one. Platinum keeps the watch cool and technical throughout; 6N gold warms the exterior and heightens the contrast with the titanium inside, which makes the hand stand out more sharply and the whole piece read as more overtly precious. Neither choice is more correct than the other, and the mechanical content of the two is identical in every respect. The reference is in current production, though a watch of this complexity is allocated rather than simply ordered from a catalog, and the wait is a direct function of how few of them the manufacture is able to build in a year. Buying secondhand, sit with the watch through an hour change and confirm that the fingers move as one rather than arriving in sequence, check that the minute ring runs cleanly beneath its cursor without hesitation, and treat full documentation and a manufacture service history as necessary rather than merely desirable on a watch carrying this many moving parts.
