The Age of Adaline | Water St. Cafe, Gastown — dinner with the only person who remembers her young

The dinner scene with Flemming is the strangest relationship in the film played completely straight: a woman who looks twenty-nine sitting across from a woman in her eighties, and the older one is her daughter. Neither of them raises her voice about it. They order, they talk, the waiter comes and goes.

The restaurant is Water St. Cafe, on the corner of Water and Cambie in Gastown, in a red-brick block that went up after the fire of 1886 levelled the neighbourhood. It has been serving there since 1988 behind tall arched windows, white tablecloths in the front room, the tram tracks and cobbles of Water Street just outside the glass. Look left through those windows and you see Raymond Saunders' steam clock, built in 1977 over a vent of the downtown steam heating system, letting off its whistle every quarter hour to a permanent ring of tourists.

That corner is the useful detail. The clock is a machine designed to make the passing of fifteen minutes into a small public event, and the film parks its ageless woman directly beside it.

Take a window table at dusk. The lamps come on along Water Street, the cobbles go slick and orange, and every quarter hour the whistle sounds outside while nothing at your table changes at all.

Location photo via Wikimedia Commons.