Time September 21/September 28, 2020REVIEW
Guadagnino tries TV
in We Are Who We Are
By Judy Berman
Fraser is an angsTy 14-year-old new yorker wiTh
painted fingernails and a fuzzy upper lip. He reads William S.
Burroughs, listens to androgynous ’70s singer Klaus Nomi and
twirls derisively through basketball games, as though mock-
ing the very idea of sports. Caitlin, meanwhile, is part of a wild
clique. She has a boyfriend but seems ambivalent about sex.
A beautiful late bloomer, she’s begun to have an effect on guys
that incites fearsome outbursts from her older brother. Some-
times she puts on a loose button-down shirt, stuffs her long
wavy hair into a cap and lets girls her age mistake her for a boy.
In We Are Who We Are—a sensual, immersive but weirdly
inert HBO drama from Call Me by Your Name and Suspiria di-
rector Luca Guadagnino—the teens are interlocking puzzle
pieces. They become neighbors when Fraser’s (Jack Dylan
Grazer) mom Sarah (Chloë Sevigny) is named commander
of a U.S. Army base in Italy, uprooting him as well as her wife
Maggie (Alice Braga). After Fraser catches Caitlin (Jordan
Kristine Seamón) in drag, accepting what her MAGA-hat-
wearing dad would surely not, Fraser introduces her to the
concept of nonbinary gender identity. She helps him feel less
alone in a strange land. They make each other make sense.
The show develops characters and relationships to the
near exclusion of plot, with the first two episodes covering
Fraser’s arrival at the base from his perspective, then again
from Caitlin’s. When the story finally starts to move, what
emerges isn’t a galvanizing problem so much as a sense that
each character, no matter how seemingly clear, will come to
surprise us. Sarah is dominant at work and in her marriage
but absorbs violent attacks from her emotionally disturbed
son. Characters are more flexible in
their identities than meets the eye. Gua-
dagnino lingers on blurred binaries—
straight and gay, Black and white, ado-
lescence and adulthood, love and hate.
The base is, itself, a liminal space: a tiny
American dot on the map of Italy.It’s a lovely, if increasingly com-
mon, theme—one that is fleshed out
in languid scenes of beach trips, street
festivals, all-night parties. When Cait-
lin, Fraser and their friends get swept
up in collective ecstasy, still shots
freeze the action, as if to commemo-
rate the brief fusion of so many con-
sciousnesses. The cultural references,
from Frank Ocean on the soundtrack
to a peach pie that sent me back to the,
er, juiciest scene of Guadagnino’s own
masterpiece, serve a real, emotional
purpose. When an intoxicated Black
boy tries to prove to a rival that he has
depth, what comes out is a line from
Kendrick Lamar’s “Alright” (which it-
self quotes Alice Walker’s The Color
Purple): “Alls my life I has to fight.”
An inscrutable character suddenly be-
comes slightly more legible.
Such moments, when time dilates
and an audiovisual medium achieves al-
most tactile vividness, are Guadagnino’s
trademark. Yet his sensibility doesn’t
fully translate to TV. While a movie is
self- contained, We Are Who We Are
doesn’t generate enough narrative mo-
mentum in early episodes to either hook
weekly viewers or fuel an eight-hour
binge. The distinction between film and
TV has been whittled down to near non-
existence, now that the pandemic has
made all video into home video. Auteurs
from David Lynch to Paolo Sorrentino
to Jane Campion have adapted their sig-
nature styles to a serialized format. But
that doesn’t mean every transition to
serialized storytelling will be seamless.
Guadagnino, for one, might have to set-
tle for being a master filmmaker.WE ARE WHO WE ARE debuts Sept. 14
on HBO‘This is
about the
bodies
and souls
of n ow.’
LUCA GUADAGNINO,
to IndieWire, on what
differentiates his
TV debut from Call
Me by Your NameTimeOff Television
◁
Call her by his name:
Caitlin (Seamón) and Fraser
(Grazer) complete each other