Fate and synchronicity seem like a natural for moviemakers -- but unless you have a master like the late Krzysztof Kieslowski in charge, these themes tend to come off more like chaos and contrivance. Tom Tykwer is as yet no master. His Winter Sleepers (1997) was a bit too mystical, his Run Lola Run (1998) was a bit too mechanical, and his latest, The Princess and the Warrior, is just a mess.

In a narrative that unravels into skeins of strained implausibility, Sissi (Franka Potente of Lola, here ethereal rather than punky), a nurse in a mental hospital, falls in love with petty criminal Bodo (Benno Fürmann, who looks disturbingly like Timothy McVeigh) when he saves her life with an emergency tracheotomy after she's been hit by a semi-trailer. He disappears, but she tracks him down, and he turns out to be a jerk whose wife apparently got blown up at a gas station. Now Bodo and his brother Walter (Joachim Król) are planning a bank heist so they can make a new life in Australia. All this unfolds with elliptical, pseudo-portentous dithering (what's the deal with the letter that opens the film?), so that long before Bodo's alter ego exits the car, you're apt to have bailed out yourself. Potente, though, has the radiance of an angel; her close-ups of anguish and ecstasy are truly moving. She looks like Cate Blanchett, the star of Heaven, Tykwer's adaptation of a posthumous Kieslowski script that's due later this year. Maybe that's the film that will make him the master of his fate. At the Cable Car.