Time travel is and will forever be a fantasy, physicists say. But fantasies can tell us more about human longings and dreams than dull facts, can they not? Despite doubting science types, time-travel-themed films have long constituted a thriving, sub-genre in Japan, as they do elsewhere.

The latest local example, Sho Tsukikawa's "The 100th Love With You" has none of the pseudo-science that informs the 1960 George Pal classic "The Time Machine," which was based on the 1895 H.G. Wells novel that started the whole time-travel thing, or the 1979 Nicholas Meyer thriller "Time After Time," which stars Malcolm McDowell as Wells himself.

Part of a "media mix" project that also includes a manga and a novel, the film instead expresses the common, eternally frustrated desire to turn back time as easily as resetting a watch, with a pathos that will moisten the eyes of all but the stone-hearted — or those fed up with Japanese dating movie conventions.