Guadagnino tries TV in We Are Who We Are
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 mocking 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. Sometimes 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 —a sensual, immersive but weirdly inert HBO drama and director 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.
