he Iberian Peninsula, home of Spain and Portugal, becomes the site of casual miracles.
A young teacher named Joanna (Padrao), hiking in the forest, uses a long stick to draw a line in the dirt. The line becomes indelible. It cannot be filled in or rubbed out.
Another young teacher, Jose (Gabino Diego), is overwhelmed by a flock of starlings, who surround him in the street and continue to follow him wherever he goes.
A night porter, Joaquim (Infante), picks up a rock that weighs as much as he does and casually tosses it into the sea. To his astonishment, and that of several eyewitnesses, it skips like a pebble for more than 50 yards.
A rift opens up across the Pyrenees, separating the entire peninsula from the rest of the European mainland. Though Americans show up to try to stitch the two land masses together before Spain and Portugal can drift too far, their efforts are to naught: Before long the new island is underway at the equivalent of 11 miles a day, and accelerating as it heads for what promises to be a catastrophic collision with the Azores.
Shadowed by the flock of starlings, Jose and Joaquim hook up with Pedro (Luppi), an elderly
pharmacist notorious for being able to sense the movement of the earth. Their travels take them into contact with Joanna, a lonely young widow named Maria (Bollain) and a strangely omniscient dog who carries around a ball of yarn.
Romance blooms as the young couples hook up, lost in what seems to be love at first sight. But who does the elderly Pedro get? And even if they are all touched by magic, can any of these strange people corral the runaway peninsula before it runs aground?
Politics are lost in translation
George Sluizer, best known for both the French and American versions of The Vanishing, here weighs in with his version of the odd political fantasy by Jose Saramago.
Domestic viewers might scratch their heads, wondering just what the whole thing is supposed to be about. There are, after all, no serious explanations offered, not even at the end. Political allegories about a Spain and Portugal physically alienated from the rest of Europe, about an America that tries to help but earns only the dismissively knowing looks of the locals and about Great Britain's determination to keep holding on to the Rock of Gibraltar aren't likely to translate, with or without subtitles.
What's left emerges as romantic whimsy, turning this odd, unexplained cataclysm into a mechanism for inserting magic into the lives of its characters. Most likable of these, in the early going, is the goony-looking Jose, a man who by his own admission has never had anything special happen to him, and who is not scared but delighted by his adoption by the flock of starlings. He spends much of his early time on screen looking up at them, unable to suppress his
great big delighted smile. His first encounter with the lovely Joanna is a minor tour de force of irrepressible infatuation.
Equally charming is the young widow Maria, whose own miracle turns out to have been unraveling thousands of feet of yarn from a single sock. Much given to statements like "News is words, but you never know if words are news," Maria is also pretty but wears a look of oppressive sadness that brightens in the presence of her new lover, Joaquim. It may or may not be intended, since Pedro is supposed to be the wise old man of this bunch, but Bollain manages to make her resonate as the smartest, most knowing person on screen, a key point when it comes to solving the problem of lonely old Pedro.
Where does it end? It's not giving all that much away to reply, somewhere in the Atlantic.
