After the mammoth undertaking of Gie, a historical epic dedicated to a key figure in Indonesian history, both Raza and Saputra must have felt great relief and pleasure shooting 3 Days to Forever, a contemporary road movie that successfully echoes the free spirit and class portraiture of Y Tu Mama Tambien. If so, their sense of enjoyment is contagious.

One of 3 Days to Forever’s chief appeals resides in the triangle formed by Raza’s vision of his two stars, Saputra and Adinia Wirasti, as cousins who take the druggy scenic route to an obligatory family wedding. Saputra’s character Suf (short for Yusuf) nurses a taboo crush on Wirasti’s Ambar. But in depicting Suf’s desire, Raza’s camera falls upon numerous flirty and attractive close-ups of Saputra, backlighting his hair and getting intimate with the features of his face in a humid car under the afternoon sun. As the film progresses and the characters face conflicts, this dynamic subtly changes and Ambar, previously bratty, becomes radiant.

Throughout 3 Days to Forever, Wirasti and especially Saputra are excellent. They also deliver the kind of swoony camera presence all-too-often missing from festival art films and Hollywood blockbusters. In some ways, Saputra’s quietly observant, enigmatic Suf is reminiscent of his personality on that boat ride.

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Melodrama often means mothers experiencing pure misery. This year’s VIFF brought a pair of such scenarios. Lee Chang-dong’s Secret Sunshine arrived in Vancouver amid round-the-world festival journeys that began with great praise at Cannes this spring, where lead actress Jeon Do-Yeon won Best Actress honors. As the director who brought us Moon So-Ri afflicted with cerebral palsy in 2002’s Oasis, Lee knows how to set up a bravura performance. In Secret Sunshine, Jeon wails, cries and vomits her way through one sheer hell of a worst-case scenario. She’s powerful, no doubt, but in terms of recent South Korean melodrama that focuses from start to finish on a female character, anyone interested should seek out the subtlety of 2004’s This Charming Girl.

Secret Sunshine is most fascinating when Jeon’s grief-stricken character grabs ahold of Christianity with fanatical force; during that stretch, Lee’s movie brings Todd Haynes’s Safe to mind, and the story’s outcome seems hard to predict. But the screenplay is almost as cumbersomely and obviously jerry-rigged as Lars Von Trier’s recent movies, and Lee’s version of Brechtian irony doesn’t have quite the wit found in Douglas Sirk -- instead, Secret Sunshine’s look is shabbily realistic, right down to a final shot that, depending on your view, suggests hell is on earth, or existence is random and banal, or both. Peppermint Candy (2000) remains my favorite Lee movie, but I’ll admit that the passions about his latest -- and its extremely snaky storyline -- mean I’ll probably take a second look at Secret Sunshine when it comes to the Bay Area.

I preferred the forthright Foster Child, one of two Manila-set movies by Brillante Mendoza at VIFF. The vitality of indie filmmaking in the Philippines at the moment is apparent from the fact that Mendoza’s traditional narrative approach is quite different from the epic or open-ended visions of directors such as Lav Diaz and Raya Martin (whose Autohystoria was disappointingly absent from VIFF -- I hope it will show up locally at a fest or museum).

Through scenes that often involve a number of over-the-shoulder tracking shots, Foster Child literally follows Thelma (the terrific and terrifically monikered Cherry Pie Picache) and three-year-old John-John (Kier Segundo) through the final days before Thelma -- who supplements her family’s small income by fostering children -- has to place John-John in the care of wealthy, white adoptive parents. When (and after) that moment arrives, Mendoza’s low-key straightforward approach and Picache’s understatedly versatile performance yield some moments that have stuck with me more than almost any others at VIFF, such as a shot of a distraught Thelma walking by a series of gargantuan advertisements whose sentiments and garishness seem to mock her.

In tone and energy, Foster Child couldn’t be more different from Slingshot, Mendoza’s other film at VIFF, a many-alley and many-level story of life and crime (and inescapable life of crime) come election time within a quarry-like tenement in Quiapo, Manila. As its title suggests, Slingshot changes directions in a furious manner, zooming through the apartments of junkies with starving babies, the shoplifting schemes of a girl who has just acquired dentures, the money struggles of a sidecar driver (Coco Martin from Mendoza’s 2005 The Masseur), the ill-fated bullying of a jammer (Nathan Lopez, the titlular character of Auraeus Solito’s The Blossoming of Maximo Oliveros), and more. Though the flamboyant Slingshot doesn’t have time to attain the depth of Foster Child, that’s the point -- Mendoza is looking at characters that, for all their frenzied activity, are trapped. The sheer energy and flexibility that the director brings to this pair of films is impressive.

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Style suits content in Mendoza’s markedly different films, but those elements have a less easy relationship in Pen-ek Ratanaruang’s latest feature, Ploy. Pen-ek is a successful director of commercials in Thailand and elsewhere, and the slickness and extremely careful art direction characteristic of that realm seep into his feature films. The one I’ve liked the most to date is 2003’s Last Life in the Universe, an icy and murderous yet somehow moving romantic comedy where Pen-ek, working with cinematographer Christopher Doyle, isn’t too proud to overtly deploy the influence of Apichatpong Weerasethakul and Miike Takashi. After the critical failure of another internationally-financed Doyle collaboration, 2006’s Invisible Waves (which I didn’t see), Pen-ek has returned to his roots somewhat with Ploy.

As embodied by Apinya Sakuljarosensuk, the title character of Ploy is some memorable Thai-Swedish fusion of Curly Sue, Lolita, and Drew Barrymore when she was partying too much too soon with mom Jade. Seriously, has there been a better permed Afro in the movies save maybe Victoria Principal’s in Earthquake? Ploy’s arrival injects a note of discord into the air-conditioned yet emotionally stuffy hotel room of jetlagged couple Tum (Porntip Papanai) and Daeng (Lalita Panyopas). Lalita Panyopas starred in Pen-ek’s 1999 murder farce 6ixty-nin9, and once again, this time in Room 603, she is involved in a variation of the director’s trademark use of a hidden corpse as a motif. Ploy also mixes the hotel drift of Lost in Translation and the alienated hotel sex of Tsai Ming-liang’s Vive L’Amour with the creepy ambience and surreal horror of David Lynch. The result isn’t wholly successful. But Ploy has moments of intrigue, not to emotion some dialogue about relationships that is as dryly funny as anything thought up by – what the hell, I’ll mention yet another reference – Woody Allen.

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Too many different influences can spoil a film. Or perhaps cinema is useless. The latter is a question entertained as a subtext by the acclaimed Jia Zhangke in his latest film, Useless. As the raves for Jia have rolled in over the years, I’ve felt a bit detached, though I’ll admit to having missed some key works in his filmography -- and perhaps to having missed the point of the ones I have seen. In the case of Useless, however, I responded immediately to Jia’s vision. By focusing on the subject of clothing and to some extension fashion, he takes on a subject matter I find inherently filmic and enjoyable (I’ll watch biodocs about Yves Saint Laurent, Yohji Yamamoto, and anyone else), and a subject that, in comparison to some of Jia’s other movies, might be outside his comfort zone. The friction that results, and the deep ambivalence and ambiguity at the center of Jia’s movie, make it the kind of work that will reward repeat viewings.

Useless takes it’s title from a clothing label started by designer Ma Ke, who is profiled in the second of the movie’s three sections. After she provides musings on the “shame” of China being associated with mass-produced cheap goods rather than allegedly more creative hand-designed and sewn pieces, Jia films the unveiling of her collection at Paris Fashion Week, where at least one older European model is nonplussed by the weight of the clothing, which has been dug up after a period of burial in the ground.

The meaning of such moments ricochets far from painlessly off of the gorgeous gliding images of employees at work in a clothing factory at the beginning of the film, and a somewhat dramatized portrait of an obsolete tailor shop in Jia’s hometown of Fenyang at the close. The result is haunting, partly because Jia’s signature leftward and rightward pans have rarely been so hypnotic, so cool and warm. When Ma Ke’s deluxe car speeds by a tailor on foot (an image similar to scenes of the protagonists' car motoring through villages in 3 Days to Forever), Jia doesn’t need words to make a point. He isn’t out to damn Ma Ke -- my guess would be that the filmmaker in him identifies with her.