Insipid though it was, My Big Fat Greek Wedding and its obese box-office success threatened not only the future of independent cinema but also that of authentic ethnic representation on the screen. Want to make a mint? Just insert the nationality of your choice after the words " My Big Fat . . .  " and turn out a low-budget sit-com. Fortunately, that wave of formulaic pseudo-multicultural pabulum has yet to materialize. Instead, two films opening this week prove that independence in both filmmaking and ethnic identity can survive the post-Wedding honeymoon. They also overcome another Hollywood homogenization, the teen movie, by offering complex and ambiguous young protagonists who are far beyond the range of marketing ciphers like Amanda Bynes.

In lesser hands, Justin Lin’s Better Luck Tomorrow might have been called My Big Fat Asian Wanna-Be Gangstas or What a Chinese Guy Wants. Instead, the title alludes to John Woo’s hard-boiled Hong Kong actioner A Better Tomorrow in its tale of alienated Asian kids from a well-to-do suburb who progress from studying hard to selling cheat sheets to dealing dope and so on into Martin Scorsese territory.

Told in circular chronology, Tomorrow opens as high-school pals Ben (Parry Shen) and Virgil (Jason Tobin) search a yard for a ringing cell phone, finally digging up the dead man who owns it. Life wasn’t always so complicated. A few months before, Ben had been a typical overachiever, hitting the books to get into a good college, joining extracurricular activities, warming a bench on the basketball team. But then he fell in with the wrong crowd. Which isn’t hard to understand, since they’re identical to the right crowd, being smart upper-middle-class Asian-American kids like Daric (Roger Fan), editor of the school paper and Ben’s introduction to the world of scams, cheating, extortion and larceny, and Steve (John Cho), a listless hunk who craves sensation and seems indifferent to his riches, including Stephanie (Karin Anna Cheung), Ben’s dream girl.

Or is Steve Ben’s dream boy? Tomorrow never tells, though it spells some things out. Among Lin’s coy devices is posting as the film’s chapter headings whatever vocabulary word ( " temerity " ; " quixotic " ) Ben happens to be studying for the SAT exams. But neither does the film judge — rather it embraces the ambiguity of experience, especially adolescent experience, which is perhaps why no parents are seen in the film (the closest thing to adult authority is a biology teacher played by Leave It to Beaver’s Jerry Mathers). That honesty and the sad, funny, authentic banter between Ben and his band of fellow privileged losers are among Tomorrow’s rueful rewards. Lin’s own tomorrow looks bright indeed.

Tomorrow begins with ennui and ends with lost innocence; first-time director Peter Sollett’s Raising Victor Vargas begins with bluster and ends with innocence, if not regained then at least recognized. Victor (Victor Rasuk) is at first so crudely callow that I almost wrote off the whole movie. Caught in the sack with " Fat Donna, " this would-be 15-year-old lothario of the Lower East Side barrio tries to redeem his reputation by hitting on the neighborhood beauty, the icy and aloof " Juicy Judy " Ramirez (Judy Marte). His secret to success with women? As he explains to his virginal though otherwise almost identical-looking younger brother Carlos (Wilfree Vasquez), " Lick your lips. "

What a pig. Fortunately, this phase is temporary, and Victor’s callous attitude is not shared by Sollett, who shows us his hero’s more vulnerable side, beginning with an unconventional family dominated by a grandmother (Altagracia Guzman) at least as dotty as the one in Greek Wedding and a lot more believable. In true romantic-comedy fashion, the antithetical Victor and Judy smooth over each other’s rough edges, uncovering not stereotypes but ingenuous souls experiencing love for the first time. Sollett, for his part, leaves his edges rough — the film is at its best when it seems least under control — and the Victor he raises is an unexpected delight.