Lifeline is a film with multiple-personality disorder : the first two-thirds feel like TV-soap opera, but the last half hour is pure poetry. Stick with it: it's worth sitting through an hour of lives and loves of Hong Kong firefighters to get to the final 30 minutes of glorious spectacle. A laborious set up includes some fine performances: in a wonderful balcony scene, Carman Lee pulls off her richest dramatic performance to date. And Lau gives another of his effective gentle charmers. After a seemingly endless hour of this, though, the climax: an extended action-escape sequence. The real business of Lifeline is firefighters-in-fire photography, and Johnny To and his team (director of photography Cheng Siu-Keung, editor Wong Wing-ming, action director Yuen Bun) let their artistry rip. I have never been seen such intoxicatingly beautiful images of pure energy like this in film. The fire has a visceral, animated presence that is as alluring, as charismatic and as terrifying as even the most vividly characterized film villain. Within this nightmare vision, To injects close, murky, claustrophobic shots of the firefighters in action. The smoke, the tightness of the space, the sense of being trapped, in terror, in an isolated and imminently explosive space are so immediately palpable that I wasn't even aware of having taken a breath until the film reached its final (overly corny) scenes of triumph. And I wasn't aware, until late in the film, of how this pure nightmare of claustrophobia resonates with what it must be like today, in early 1997, on the ground, in Hong Kong, for those who have reason to fear the coming transition to Chinese rule.