And, then, the same month Pulp Fiction celebrates its 30th birthday, the 61-year-old director abruptly announced that The Movie Critic was no more. Apparently crushed beneath the weight of expectation foisted on the project by its creator, Tarantino announced its cancellation. There was talk of endless rewrites for a script described as a nostalgic character study set in the seedy LA milieu, in which Tarantino first discovered the movies, featuring a character based on The New Yorker’s legendary film critic Pauline Kael, whose hold on the director — seems to have played a big role in Tarantino’s self-psych-out. 

Kael pops up in Tarantino’s recent book of film criticism, Cinema Speculation, more frequently than Alfred Hitchcock, Francis Ford Coppola, Brian De Palma, Sergio Leone and Steven Spielberg, and is the source of Tarantino’s much-vaunted go-out-with-a-bang-Butch-and-Sundance retirement plan. “I just don’t want to be an old-man filmmaker,” he has said, repeatedly, over the years “I want to stop at a certain point. Directors don’t get better as they get older.” 

The opinion was fully explored by Kael in a 1998 interview. “I do think directing is a young man’s game,” she told Modern Maturity, which Tarantino would have read about the same time he was recovering from the disappointing box office of Jackie Brown. “Directing is something people do best when they’re young, with the possible exceptions of Vittorio de Sica and Luis Buñuel. When you’re young, you use all your senses and have the devilry to do something new that will affect an audience deeply. Spielberg doesn’t do now what he did as a young man. He did crazy, goofy things. Jaws was a great comedy; in E.T., he let his childhood feelings inform the material in a direct way. But Hook was deadly, no child’s imagination left in it. Schindler’s List is a work of feeling, but planned feeling. Everything becomes safer and more extravagant as you get older.” 

Is this true? And even if it is true, should filmmakers be heeding it as closely as Tarantino evidently has? The collapse of The Movie Critic couldn’t have been more appositely timed, as news arrived of a herd of swansongs converging on Cannes this year, where Francis Ford Coppola (85), George Lucas (80) and Paul Shrader (77) — three luminaries of the New Hollywood, now in their late seventies and eighties — will be premiering films and collecting awards, Coppola with Megalopolis, Shrader with Oh, Canada, and Lucas collecting an honorary awards just for being George Lucas. This as Scorsese (81) announced his next two films, one about Jesus and the other about Frank Sinatra, and Clint Eastwood readied his 40th and final film, Juror no 2, for release at the age of 93. 

It is unlikely any of these films will catch the vigour of their respective director’s earlier work. There is a special bloom to a filmmaker’s first films, when even the most uncompromising of geniuses must be at their most charming to persuade financiers to part with their millions, and audiences to with their hard-earned cash. 

The 25-year-old Orson Welles could talk a dog off a meat wagon when he made Citizen Kane. Terrence Mallick’s Badlands is as near perfect a film as he would ever make. David Lynch would never again manage the narrative economy of Blue Velvet. Audience preference for Woody Allen’s “early funny” movies became so pronounced that he even turned it into a gag in Stardust Memories. Not many would agree wholly with Kael’s dismissal of Schindler’s List, but a Spielberg top ten would largely comprise the astonishing quartet of films — Jaws, Close Encounters, Raiders of the Lost Ark, ET — made in his twenties and early thirties. 

The same goes for Scorsese, who has, in his recent films, come closest to essaying a “late” style — blunt, attenuated, much haunted by moral reckonings and regrets, shorn of the sometimes overwrought camera pyrotechnics of his youth. 

Success can be a bitch. After years of toiling like Sisyphus to get their foot in the door, the director starts to hear the word “yes” too much, where previously they heard “no”. The friction that fostered creative decisions disappears along with the discipline required to push open the gate posts, the charm required to win over an audience and the willingness to tell a story. They become an adjective — “Spielbergian”, “Lynchian” — and become much more conscious of effects that once came naturally. 

Here’s a good hypothetical to test the truth of Kael’s proposition: imagine a filmmaker’s fifth or sixth film as their first, and then try to imagine whether it launches the same legend. If Spielberg’s first films were not Jaws and Close Encounters but Hook and The Color Purple, what rock would we currently find him under? What happens to a David Lynch who starts with Lost Highway or Inland Empire? Or imagine that, instead of the double-barrelled blast of Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction, Tarantino had kicked off with Kill Bill or any of the three-hour adrenaline-rush geek fantasies that followed, where blood the colour of raspberries spurts from severed arms and legs and the characters all sound like they have swallowed dictionaries  “To what do I owe this dubious pleasure?” Well, pardonnez moi.

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Nobody in Pulp Fiction, Reservoir Dogs or even Jackie Brown talks like this: they’re too hard-wired into contemporary street vernacular, the source of all that is most miraculous in Tarantino’s writing. No neophyte filmmaker would dream of inflicting a six-hour movie on an audience. With Kill Bill as his first film, what happens to him? He would still get the geeks, the fanboys, and maybe some of the box office, but not the critics, not the Palme D’or, nor the comparisons to Welles, and the outsized influence. 

The Hateful Eight is not a movie that upends the Zeitgeist, as Pulp Fiction did. At a recent 30th anniversary for the latter, Uma Thurman called it “probably the last film Quentin made that was on schedule, where he actually tried to make his days and make his weeks,” to laughter from the audience. 

It might behove him to pay more attention to critiques like Thurman’s than Kael’s. Tarantino has proven himself a perceptive critic — Cinema Speculation bested most of the writers who have written about his films — but you have to ask whether filmmakers should really be attempting to micro-manage their own legacy to the extent that Tarantino has. 

“I’m not sure that I would trust my own sense of the absolute value of a piece of work to know whether or not it should have been brought into existence,” Christopher Nolan told the ReelBlend podcast when Tarantino’s retirement plans came up. “I’m a big fan, as is Quentin, of films that maybe don’t fully achieve what they try to, but there’s something in there that’s a performance, or a little structural thing, or a scene, you know, that’s wonderful. And so, yes, I understand. I think I wanted to keep a sort of perfect reputation of something, but also kind of don’t want to take anything off the table.”

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The irony is that the filmmaker Nolan describes — past their prime, but still showing flashes of the old genius — almost exactly describes his friend Quentin Tarantino, whose recent filmography requires exactly such panhandling for the good bits: the fight amid the breakfast cereal in Kill Bill, the Ku Klux Klan scene in Django Unchained. It’s hard not to hear a pang of mortality in the director’s attempt to stop the clock. Nobody gets to sit out the march of time unless they are John Travolta’s Vincent Vega, resurrected from a hail of bullets by dint of a miraculous flashback at the end of Pulp Fiction. 

Young punks tend to take advancing years badly — have you seen Sean Penn’s updo recently? — but beneath Tarantino’s braggadocio would seem to be the knowledge, half-suppressed, that the cinematic flesh has long since started to sag. Film directing after a certain age becomes about leg strength. 

Oddly, Tarantino did once make a movie which acknowledged the weight of years with unexpected grace: Jackie Brown, the movie whose “failure” at the box-office Tarantino was reeling from when Pauline Kael called directing a young man’s game. In it, a 56-year-old bail bondsman, played by Robert Forster, helps and slowly falls for a 44-year-old air stewardess with a suitcase full of cash. 

Sitting down together in a sports bar, they discuss  how to quit smoking without gaining weight, their vinyl collections and getting old. “My ass ain’t the same,” she confides. “I’m a little sensitive about my hair,” he tells her with a crinkly smile. With its mellow, soulful groove, restrained pace and ruefulness about the passage of time written in the faces of its lead actors, the film offers a tantalising glimpse of the filmmaker Tarantino chose not to become. Maybe there’s a reason his swansong fell through — he has already made it. 

Londongrad may be where Russian oligarchs go for their financial transactions of various legitimacy, but La Belle France is where they play. Last weekend, France 2’s Journal, a TV news show given more to sobriety than sensationalism, took its viewers on a visual tour of how Russia’s new rich live it up locally, from the ski chalet in Courchevel to the Cap-quelque-chose-ou-autre summer house. What stuck on the retina — and in the French craw — were the pontoons running into the bright blue sea so that the oligarchs could park their yachts.

And what yachts! Amore Vero, owned by Igor Sechin, head of the Russian state oil company Rosneft, has a Thunderbirds-esque swimming pool that turns into a helipad. Worth £90 million, the Amore Vero has now been seized by French customs in a night-time raid on a dockyard near Marseille. “He is one of Vladimir Putin’s most trusted and closest advisers, as well as his personal friend”, the accompanying EU sanction notice alleges.

Some years ago, The Hollywood Reporter, covering the Cannes film festival, happened to ask a local estate agent how many ultra-rich Russians there were on the French Riviera. He estimated 20,000 of them. “They bring their funny money from Russia through Cypress into the Riviera. They’ve kept the market moving for 10 years. So they can be a little thuggish — who cares?” In a detail one would blush to make up, the secretive Kremlin billionaire Suleiman Kerimov (the subject of a long-running tax evasion and money laundering investigation by the French authorities) is believed to own the sumptuous villa on the Cap d’Antibes used in the Michael Caine movie Dirty Rotten Scoundrels.

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The Med may be the place for Putin’s friends, but the family and the real intimates head to Biarritz for their holidays. France’s glittering south-west coast has been irresistible to rich Russians since the middle of the 19th century. (It was once dubbed the “queen of resorts and the resort of kings.”) Flunkies of the imperial court came both for the climate and for the coddling offered by the beach-side Hôtel du Palais, originally built in the 1850s for the French Empress Eugénie. And it was in Biarritz that the then-head of the Federal Security Service received an urgent phone call from Boris Yeltsin, in the Summer 1999, asking him to become prime minister.

Around the same time Putin accepted the rule of all the existing Russias, and those to be regained, the Kremlin appointed an honorary vice consul in Biarritz, a town of less than 30,000 people. Nearby Bordeaux, France’s seventh largest city, received no diplomatic outpost. “It was because Putin’s circle has an affection for this place,” admitted the man selected for the job, otherwise known as biographer Alexandre de Miller de La Cerda. The “To Do” list of the Kremlin’s man in Biarritz has included hosting debutante balls in the casino for the children of the Russian elite — an opportunity for Putin’s courtiers to feel like the heirs to the czarist aristocracy. Indeed, a sojourn in Biarritz is an attempt to confer class and legitimacy on Russian’s nouveau riche.

As one might expect, the Putins are tight-lipped about their property holdings in Biarritz, though various news agencies have identified at least three, beginning with the villa located at 9, rue de la Frégate (the street once home to Igor Stravinsky), in the town centre, bought in 1996 for around $400,000. The title deed is in the name of one of Putin’s daughters. According to Time magazine, in 2012 another Putin daughter bought a property in the town with her husband, Kirill Shamalov, an oil-executive reputed to be worth $1.25 billion. (He is also one of the founders of Bank Rossiya, which the US Treasury Department identified in 2014 as the “personal bank” for Putin and his close associates.) The seller of the property was oil trader Gennady Timchenko, one of Putin’s oldest friends.

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What’s wrong with buying a few holiday homes? Well, as a civil servant of the Russian state, Putin was barred in 1996 from taking money out of the country. He was also officially only earning circa $1,000 a month. Currently, the self-described “galley slave” ascetically proclaims no individual wealth at all, beyond a small plot of land, a modest pension pot, three Russian cars, a couple of homely apartments, and a Skif M1 trailer tent. Lyudmila Putin’s financial records, filed during her marriage to Putin, show only relatively miniscule sums. She supposedly earned just 121,000 rubles ($3,800) during the whole of 2012. The following year, Villa Suzanna was purchased in her name and that of her new husband, the head of a non-profit with no known money. The villa had been on the market for around £5 million.

“Luxury property is a preferred means of laundering money stemming from corruption or embezzlement of public funds”, Sara Brimbeuf of Transparency International France told France 24 News. When Time magazine asked Father Panteleimon, the priest at the Russian Orthodox Church in Biarritz, about the Kremlin elites who visited his parish, he replied: “what they do here just doesn’t look good.” Nor does it look good to French finance minister Bruno Le Maire, who has created a “task force” of customs officers, tax officers and ministry officials to draw up a list of oligarch-controlled assets in France and begin seizing them.

Fabien Roussel, the French Communist Party’s personable candidate in the upcoming election for the Élysée, tweeted a suggestion: storm the oligarch’s summer palaces and use them “to welcome refugees from Ukraine”. He got 2,500 likes; he normally gets a hundred. At the capitalist end of the French spectrum, luxury brands Hermès, Chanel and LMVH — all beloved of Russian oligarchs — have announced suspension of activity in Russia itself.

And the EU, of which France currently holds the presidency (and, a cynic would aver, always holds the political reins), has sanctioned 400 times more Russian entities than Downing Street. Le Maire claims that the total amount of Russian assets frozen amount to “almost 1,000 billion dollars”.

“No oligarch will slip through our net”, promises Le Maire, adding that oligarchs’ “partners, their children, their property holding companies” would be affected, “such that they won’t be able to hide behind financial constructs”. Like owning villas.

While Macron’s parlaying with Putin sometimes smacks of appeasement, his fellow Frenchmen are taking a harder line. It’s less Bienvenu à Biarritz, more “Fuck Poutine” — as another local daubing proclaims.