LIFELINE (1997)
Directed by: Johnnie To
Starring: Lau Ching-wan, Ruby Wong, Alex Fong, Carman Lee

Pure firefighter porn, LIFELINE is the greatest ode to firepeople ever made, and the toughest movie shoot a bunch of actors have ever survived. Johnnie To has the style to turn this kind of civil service promo into an exhilarating shot of adrenaline and working class glory. A martial arts movie with firefighters instead of Shaolin monks, it’s an anthem to career satisfaction, workplace heroics, and the kind of gooey “job well-done” feeling that makes us all get up and go to work in the morning.

The plot structure is simplicity itself. An emotionally generous remake of BACKDRAFT, LIFELINE spends its first hour delineating a station house full of firefighters, their cares and dreams, and then it lights a warehouse on fire and drops them inside. A real warehouse. A real fire. Don’t let anyone tell you HKSAR actors don’t earn their checks.

Two weeks of research (a long time in Hong Kong) and almost six months of production gave To and crew the material they needed. No terrorists here, no hostage situations, and no heroes. Just ordinary, working class men and women doing their jobs. We first meet our firefighters group-puking at an emergency room after eating some spoiled vegetables. With great economy the main characters are introduced over the next few scenes: Lau Ching-wan, an older firefighter stuck in no-promotion-limbo because of his adherence to saving lives over workplace politics; Raymond Wong, the new kid who’s scared to slide down the pole and whose hectoring dad is played by Chan Man-lui (Takeshi Kaneshiro’s dad in FALLEN ANGELS); Ruby Wong (in her first film) as second in command of the station house with a wreck of a private life; Alex Fong, the stiff-necked new commander whose private life is also a wreck; Carman Lee, an emergency room doctor whose private life is a wreck. You can see a trend here.

But it’s in their work that these imperfect, tantrum-throwing, stressed-out people achieve a state of grace, becoming more than they are in their everyday, messed-up lives. For the first hour they deal with babies in wells, elevator collapses, car wrecks, everything except the proverbial cat stuck in the tree. The movie’s more than half over before we see a fire at all but when we do, it’s a doozey. This is hot fire, with no special effects (90% of the fire on screen is real “ouch that hurts!” flames), and cast and crew were still hawking up soot two months after the shoot.

A testament to the way Hong Kong film makers have painted dreams onscreen for decades by doing nothing more than pushing the limits of human endurance, this is the kind of movie that earns its redemptive moments and makes you want to close your laptop and go sign up at the nearest firehouse.