STIFF UPPER LIPS AT THE INSTITUT FRANCAIS

As the Howard Hawks retrospective at the NFT gets underway, and reveals the generic range which one director can straddle, another London film season is about to illustrate how a director can nearly become a one-man genre.

James Ivory has been responsible for some of the more critically-acclaimed, and commercially successful, British films of recent years. But the "Merchant-Ivory film" has become almost an entirely predictable event: a gentle trawl through middle-class mores, with some sumptuous scenery, pretty costumes and a recognisable repertory company - from the much-lauded Emma Thompson, Anthony Hopkins and Simon Callow to the perennially-typecast Helena Bonham-Carter and Rupert Graves.

Such is the success of the formula, that other British period films seem to seamlessly blend into the Merchant-Ivory canon: Charles Sturridge's A Handful of Dust; Pat O'Connor's A Month in the Country, and Richard Attenborough's Shadowlands all have familiar faces and literary landscapes. As if to rescue American-born Ivory - not to mention his Indian-born collaborator Ismail Merchant and their Polish/German/ Jewish stalwart screenwriter Ruth Prawer Jhabvala - from the quintessentially English mire, the Institut Francais has chosen him as one of their featured artists for its January-February film season.

The classic English adaptations are on offer - Kazuo Ishiguro's Booker Prize-winning study of emotional repression, The Remains of the Day, and his Forster trilogy A Room With a View, Maurice, and Howards End. But the French connection is on view too: Quartet, an adaptation of a Jean Rhys novel set in 1920s Paris, and starring Isabelle Adjani and Maggie Smith; the disappointing Jefferson in Paris, with Nick Nolte and Greta Scacchi, and the recently-released Surviving Picasso, with that man Hopkins in the title role. The season begins this Wednesday with a screening of Shakespeare-Wallah, an early Ivory tale of a troupe of English travelling players in India, with Felicity Kendal.

However, if that's too much like encasing your upper-lip in cement, the other artist in focus during the Institut's current season may be an antidote: the actor who was "Monsieur France", Jean Gabin. Highlights include the film noirs of his 1930s doom- laden heyday - Pepe le Moko, La Bete Humaine, and Le Quai des Brumes - as well as later gems such as Jean Renoir's French CanCan.

Institut Francais, 17 Queensberry Place, London, SW7 (0171-838 2146), from Wed to 28 Feb.