Wavy red underlining announces it is not a word. Even the  computer monitor admits defeat with "no spelling suggestions." But The Stoneraft it is – the chosen title of director-producer George Sluizer’s Dutch-Portuguese-Spanish co-production, as poetic license combines words usually separate, thus reversing the plot’s drift of separating the normally united.

In the Yvette Birot screenplay from a 1986 novel by Nobel Prize-winner José Saramago, an unexplained crack develops near the Pyrenees. Accompanied by other odd natural phenomena, it grows long and wide enough to detach the Iberian Peninsula from the rest of the continent. Gibraltar, as well, comes unglued and floats by like a gaily bedecked cruise ship as Portugal and Spain accelerate on collision course towards the Azores.

Although concentration is almost entirely on the Citroën-2CV odyssey of five people, with little shown of others, there are humorous episodes of Americans trying to mind the widening gap, politicians jumping the ship of state, Continentals picketing to become Iberians, and panic or semi-religious millenarian frenzy among populations.

Wryly surmising that there is more here than meets the scientific eye, two young men begin a journey on which they are joined by an older man, two women met separately, a wise dog and, when the car gives up its ghost, one, then two, horses. The novel’s ratio of three Portuguese to two Spaniards is reversed (though one of the latter is actually Argentine) as the five travel mainly along the beautiful northern Costa Verde "Green Coast" (ironically, now befouled from Galicia/Finisterre to the western Pyrenees by eighteen million gallons of crude from Prestige).

A varied group – from mystic apothecary to pazo (farmhouse) earth-woman – they learn about life, themselves and even death; most of all, they experience at first hand the practical significance of sacrifice and love. Like the journey of that earlier knight-errant of La Mancha, this one is part social satire and part allegory. Unfortunately, it is also fable and parable, morality tale, metaphor, romance, idyll and mysticism, fantasy and fact, and in the uneasy mishmash of too many ingredients, the film loses its path and founders.

The cast includes the dignified Federico Luppi (Cronos), Icíar Bollaín (Loach’s Land and Freedom and herself director of the excellent Flowers from Another World), and Gabino Diego (Belle Epoque), but no one can do much with such pseudo-"deep" dialogue that pauses awkwardly and repeatedly to call attention to its own inflated aphorisms. The quest-journey is weighted with self-conscious but empty lines, and so deliberate is the pacing that the actors appear to have drifted off, as well.

Casually, the legend is recounted of stone boats that reached the Peninsula bearing saints, including the apostle St. James the Greater (San Diego, St. Iago; hence, Santiago), but the film’s reverse covering of his famous pilgrims’ road, here from west to east, finds neither salvation nor knowledge. A proclaimed New Atlantis is really the same old thing, and twelve-to-fifteen million beatifically smiling pregnant women promise nothing beyond a like number of births. What a pity that a concept most alive with possibilities arrives thus stillborn.

(Released by MGS Film; not rated by MPAA.)