‘On The Pulse’: Venice Review

Dir: Alix Delaporte. France. 2023. 86mins

An aspiring TV news camerawoman finds herself thrust into the heart of the action when she is taken on as an intern on a primetime news programme in French director Alix Delaporte’s third feature. Based on Delaporte’s own experience of interning at the CAPA agency before she turned to filmmaking, On The Pulse has a few interesting points to make about workplace families, learning on the job and the commercial pressures which are turning  committed investigative reporters into an endangered species. But although there’s charm in Alice Isaaz’s central performance as feisty heroine Gabrielle, the film runs out of dramatic steam as it meanders through an episodic series of newsroom crises and low-flame trials of fire for the newbie camera operator.

 Comes across like a newsroom TV series that has been condensed into a 90-minute omnibus episode

It’s been nine years since Delaporte’s last film, The Last Hammer Blow, and twelve since her well-received debut, Angele & Tony. There was an edge to the drama in both of those stories that is entirely lacking in On The Pulse, which starts off promising an ethical news gathering drama in the style of Network before revealing that, deep down, it’s a rom-com. Though it’s pleasant enough to nuzzle into a streaming berth, it’s difficult to see the film’s theatrical prospects extending much beyond Francophone Europe.

Arriving in Paris on a Flixbus from her home in Grenoble, Gabrielle turns up in the office of a serious, old-school investigative TV news team with her CV and a letter of introduction. Team leader Vincent (Roschidy Zem) takes a shine to her and that very same day she is thrust into the team’s high-adrenaline world, as camera assistant on a hospital reportage. A run-in with experienced reporter Damien (Vincent Elbaz) teaches Gabrielle her first lesson: that in order to get the truth of a story, you don’t always need to tell the truth to those who give it to you. No-nonsense team manager Camille (Pascale Arbillot) and journalist Kosta (Jean-Charles Clichet) – who specialises in uncomfortable interview questions – are two of the other main players in a newsroom that is fighting network cost-cutting and the pressure to cover stories that appeal to a younger demographic.

Anyone who has come into a stress-tested team of workers who have known each other for years will have some sympathy for Gabrielle as she attempts to puzzle out the dynamics and not make a fool of herself, while picking up some of the tools of the trade and seizing the chance to make her mark – as she does when she is left alone with the camera at a fashion show, after the others have been booted out following one of Kosta’s sucker-punch questions. As On The Pulse cycles through other stories – Damien’s departure for a war-torn African country, the raid on an intensive rabbit breeding facility by animal rights activists – it gradually dawns on us that the film is going nowhere except in the direction suggested by the tender glances Vincent and Gabrielle are exchanging.

In the end, Delaporte’s efficiently shot memoir-film comes across like a newsroom TV series that has been condensed into a 90-minute omnibus episode – perhaps a journalistic take on Le Bureau des Legendes, the absorbing five-season Canal+ series that was set in a different kind of Parisian office. But there is plenty at stake in that widely seen French export product, while there is very little to stir our passions, or tax our minds, in this gentle divertissement.