Although in the original Japanese Cafe Funiculi Funicula bears the name of Kawaguchi’s first novel, it is a film that takes the stories from Before the coffe gets cold and combines them with the revelations about Kazu’s background in Tales from the café, modifying them and making them more suitable for the cinematographic medium.

The main character of the film, in fact, seems to be Kazu (Kasumi Arimura) who, not only with her power manages to send the customers of the café for a walk in time, but also has a very deep story that links her to the ghost of the café. Her character has been merged and superimposed on that of Kei, her cousin Nagare‘s (Motoki Fukami) wife, who in the first novel travels to the future to meet the daughter she has never known. Despite these changes, however, the plot of the film works and is completely believable.

Unlike the novel, to tell the story of the characters and make the viewer understand the implications of time travel, one moves from the café which is no longer the only place where the narrated events take place.

The special effects, used for the time travel, leave dazed at first but, journey after journey, one can appreciate their rendering in what seems to be the passage room between one temporal dimension and the another. However, I did not notice the presence of a particular soundtrack.

The acting of the actors is credible (and typically Japanese) and it is a pleasure to find familiar faces such as Haru and Kento Hayashi in minor roles.

Overall, this film can be considered one of those little gems that the Japanese cinema usually offers its audience to convey a profound message but in an unpretentious way.