IF DIRECTOR Tom Tykwer had made Winter Sleepers after Run Lola Run instead of immediately before, it might have been a much better movie. Lola examined the idea that one's fate is derived from a million unknown, inexplicable factors, giddily celebrating its own manipulative shallowness and the essential dishonesty of film narrative. Its charming metaphysical naiveté was no doubt part of its success.

Unfortunately, Tykwer also brought his schoolboy notions about fate into Winter Sleepers, which is, at heart, a much more complex film. The resulting creative schizophrenia reveals itself in less than 10 minutes. A visually assured introduction to a ski resort setting and the characters rapidly declines into a strident, obvious sequence, culminating in a major car accident that severely injures the daughter of a local farmer. The change in rhythm and style is so jarring, one spends the rest of the movie waiting for the two approaches to converge. They never do. Instead, we get twin storylines with shared characters and wildly divergent themes.

One storyline follows the farmer as he searches for the identity of the mysterious witness he believes helped cause the accident. The other is a more organic exploration of two interdependent relationships headed in opposite directions: the tenuous first steps of a love affair between the witness (a blackout-prone film projectionist) and a nurse caring for the victim; and the unhealthy final weeks of a fling between a philandering ski instructor and the nurse's roommate. Tykwer places his characters into sumptuous settings, infuses each one with symbolic significance -- right down to the color of their clothes -- and then leaves the actors alone.

But just as the snowbound interaction between the two couples reaches an intolerable, exquisite tension, Tykwer jerks the film back to the farmer's quest and a dull focus on the power of the unexplained.

Winter Sleepers is beautifully filmed, and at times mordantly funny, but never overcomes Tykwer's simplistic overlay of narrative strategies. Still, it's an entertaining failure, and may one day be best known as the movie that contains all of Tykwer's thematic concerns in one over-inflated, discordant package.