Review: Option 3

Few filmmakers mount a full-scale musical as their first feature, so maybe it's fitting that Colma: The Musical director Richard Wong made a highly personal, small-cast, sparsely scripted art film as his sophomore effort. Yet Wong and Colma collaborator H.P. Mendoza didn't step back in any other way with this latest project. Option 3 is consistently well shot and edited, even taking on more challenges than most mainstream films do.

The movie is a meditation on lost love, but in the form of an urban thriller. Thus it goes light on the Emily Dickinson poems (though it includes some snippets, marking perhaps the first time the lonely poet has been paired with Thai martial arts) and is far less self-indulgent than most breakup movies.

As the film races through styles, including a bit of rock musical, the story is relatively easy to follow yet not really to understand: A young man's girlfriend is kidnapped and he has to retrieve something of hers -- it's never clear what -- and deliver it if he ever wants to see her again. Naturally, things don't turn out quite as planned. The film can be frustrating as it moves between action and flashbacks, and Option 3 isn't satisfying in conventional film terms. Wong even said, introducing its premiere at SFIAAFF on Sunday, that it's not a movie at all.

The pleasure in this film comes from the beauty or thrill of particular sequences, such as a closeup of two pairs of lips in silhouette or an escape down several flights of stairs in one shot. For a shoestring-budget project from two relative newcomers, it's remarkably polished. And in an age when an arty chase film can win Best Picture without even delivering a final showdown, who's to say what counts as a movie?