Charlie Polinger’s drama captures the terror of adolescence

In this “queasily stylish” drama-thriller, the swimming pools, locker rooms and dorms of a boys’ water polo camp in New England are a “puberty Petri dish livid with sinister bacteria”, said Jessica Kiang in Variety.

It is 2003, and a sensitive 12-year-old named Ben (Everett Blunck) has arrived at the camp part-way through. He’s new to the area, and desperate to fit in with the popular boys. At first, their “deceptively cherubic” ringleader Jake (Kayo Martin) is friendly enough, mainly because he has spied a better target for his ridicule: an oddball named Eli (Kenny Rasmussen) with a nasty rash that Jake declares to be “the plague” – leading to the boy’s total ostracisation. Ben “feels for Eli’s predicament”, but lacks the social cachet to risk being seen with the outcast kid.

Everything about the camp, with its beige corridors and scuffed canteen, is familiar and nondescript, said Alissa Wilkinson in The New York Times, but writer-director Charlie Polinger knows how to make the everyday ominous. In the first shot, we see the boys treading water, to a guttural score that is “vaguely reminiscent of the Jaws theme”. The viewer is confused: is everything normal, or is something truly sinister happening? – which is what Ben is wondering too.

This is not a nice movie with reassuring lessons about kindness or being true to yourself; it’s darker and more feral than that, much like adolescence itself. The first hour is terrific, said Phil Hoad in The Guardian. Polinger (a graduate of such camps himself) is astute about the way boys talk; he observes Jake’s mob like a nature documentary; and the young stars excel. Sadly, the film becomes more predictable, and it never resolves the suggestion that, if not quite real, the “plague” might be psychosomatic.

by Katherine Harvey 

We tend to think of our medieval ancestors as warty, unwashed, riddled with fleas, doomed to die young, and with little or no knowledge of medicine, or the body’s workings, said Helen Carr in The Telegraph. But in this “richly” detailed book, Katherine Harvey seeks to explain what they did, thought and knew – and it turns out that many of their concerns mirrored our own, from digestion and hair loss to mental health. Their medicine was based on the idea that the body was made up of four “humors” – blood, phlegm, black bile and yellow bile – connected to air, fire, earth and water. Good health relied on keeping them in balance, by blood-letting for example.

Medieval physicians’ views on diet, said Gerard DeGroot in The Times, were surprisingly similar to ours; they recognised the importance of fresh air and clean water, and they perceived a connection between body and mind. During the plague in Venice in 1348, “restrictions were placed on the wearing of mourning garb because it encouraged sadness, which damaged physical health”.

That said, some of their treatments were pretty weird. A mix of cow dung and wine was thought to cure obesity; male baldness was linked to the body drying out, so baths were prescribed. As for sex, this was believed to be good in moderation – for marital harmony, and as a form of exercise. If both parties orgasmed, all the better as this would help in the excretion of harmful superfluities.

This is a terrific book: I’ve rarely had such fun learning about the past. Ultimately, it leads one to the conclusion that our ancestors were “a lot like us: they fretted about their health, took steps to improve it, and cared for those who suffered. In the process of examining the medieval body, we also get a glimpse at the soul.”

The influential Italian designer behind Diesel jeans

Known as the “godfather of denim”, Adriano Goldschmied, who has died aged 82, transformed the industry by helping to turn “ordinary jeans into desirable signifiers of status”, said The Telegraph. In the 1970s, the market was dominated by the American workwear brands Lee, Levi’s and Wrangler, and a typical pair of their jeans, he said, cost $19. Goldschmied – who would go on to found Diesel – sold “designer jeans”, tailored to a more discerning market, for six times that much. He justified the price tag by citing the effort that went into their design and production. To give his jeans the lived-in or distressed look that he popularised, he tumbled them around with rocks, rubbed them down with sandpaper, cured them in an oven and blasted them with a blowtorch. He also experimented with novel fabric combinations, using synthetics to make jeans that were stretchy and clingy, and pioneered stonewashing (experimenting with bleaches in his own garden). “Denim is always open to interpretation,” he said. “Otherwise, jeans can be so boring.”

Adriano Goldschmied was born into a Jewish family in Turin in 1943. By then, the Nazis had occupied Italy and his mother had gone into hiding. His father had joined the Italian resistance and was captured before he could see his son; he died at Auschwitz. After the War, Goldschmied was captivated by the jeans worn by American GIs stationed in the city; he bought his first pair aged 14. By the 1970s, a younger generation was in the market for new fashions, and denim was “ripe for enterprise”, said The New York Times. It wasn’t being manufactured in Italy, but Goldschmied learnt that a shipment had just landed in Naples, and snapped the rolls up. They turned out to be offcuts but, undaunted, he patched the scraps together and turned them into hot pants. A self-confessed “ski bum”, he sold his creations to the jet-setters at the Cortina d’Ampezzo – the ski resort once frequented by Brigitte Bardot. He launched his first line, Daily Blue, in 1974, then partnered with the designer Renzo Rosso to found the company that included the Diesel brand.

In 1985, Rosso bought Goldschmied’s share in the firm for $500,000 – when annual sales amounted to about $5m, said The Times. This would become a pattern for the restless designer: he’d launch or co-launch a brand and, when it became successful, he’d walk away and start another. He was involved in more than 50 in all, including Rivet, Replay and AG Jeans. In the 1990s, people started to realise that with all the washings and rinsings, dying and bleaching, premium denim had an appalling impact on the environment. Declaring that “we have to repair our mistakes”, Goldschmied started looking at ways of making denim more sustainable, with production processes that involved fewer chemicals and recycled water. In 2014, he partnered with Chloé to produce the first 100% biodegradable jeans. A “quiet and unshowy man”, he owned only five pairs of jeans himself. None were his designs: he favoured vintage Levi’s 501s. He is survived by his wife Michela and their three daughters.