Show me the coast
I like to think of We Are Who We Are as a collection of short stories. Episodes of things normally have helpful, composite relationships with one another, whereas various aspects of We Are constantly resist the idea of meaning, consequence; as though closure might deprive its key characters a life of any intrigue. Luca Guadagnino shot a slightly different tale of sexual awakening with 2017’s Call Me By Your Name; but it’s testament to his touch that you can leap cold into this piece of event television, and identify pretty quickly you’re in the company of wild genius.
A bunch of American kids try to make the most of life on a military base on an otherwise lush Italian island. There are no malls to speak of, not that many house parties, and there’s an enforced — perhaps inherent — sense of duty imposed on their youth. So they rebel. Holiday homes are broken into by a motley crew made up of fragile high school alliances. Wine bottles are chugged without refrain and then flung into the ocean because time, and therefore the law, and therefore the planet, don’t matter. The storytelling of Guadagnino, Paolo Giordano and Francesca Manieri doesn’t have a typical arc towards romantic justice, but the pure feat of it is that doesn’t bother their affection for a precocious roster of characters .
Fraser is fresh off the boat from New York, now that his mom (portrayed by a mostly stone-faced Chloë Sevigny) has been asked to head up command in this portion of the Mediterranean. Colonel Sarah Wilson is in a very sophisticated relationship with Major Maggie Teixeira, and is an innovative parent (to say the very least) when it comes to managing Fraser. He walks around his new community with the gait of an artist or a recluse or an alien, searching maybe for kids enigmatic enough to help him challenge our biases. When he happens upon and latches onto Caitlin, it is established very quickly that We Are has no interest in conventional dynamics between the races or the sexes. We tend to want to see tension resolved by intimacy — demand creatures to despise, creatures to adore, and creatures to moralise in blog posts and chat threads — but the narrative starves us of easy answers; of answers, period.
Caitlin plays by all the rules before Fraser draws her into a friendship that isn’t quite platonic but isn’t quite heterosexual either. She has a cool boyfriend, hangs out with cool kids, and should (by extension) be a cool kid herself. Her dad, a Lieutenant Colonel capably played by Kid Cudi, appears to be a black man who voted for Trump. This doesn’t make it easy to dismiss that he’s an attentive and actually rather awesome dad. But does he get to distrust the lesbian coupling at Fraser’s house, for being a stranded black man in a white man’s world? Complications like these are where Guadagnino, Giordano and Manieri wish to live.
When Caitlin hangs out with the gang, she’s one of those perfectly agreeable teens you wish you’d been in high school. She always knows what to say, what to wear, and in her own way she illuminates the coast. When she aligns herself with Fraser, she transforms her wardrobe. She questions the iron rods her father and older brother have always wielded over their home. But she’s no pioneer, because all of these kids can’t help but fumble as they try their hardest to become anything but their parents.
I watched Caitlin daydream out the window of a bus to some odd symphonic twinkle when it first occurred to me this had to be Guadagnino behind the camera; the way he sandwiches all this youth, all this experiment, all this adventure, between thick, sprawling slices of sky and ocean. Sometimes the creative team compromises the viewer by making us stake out with them for the perfect moment, for the dialogue to align with all the messages these characters transmit with their bodies. But We Are Who We Are is worth all the waiting if you can shut out the world entirely, to just prod a damp finger in its breeze.
