TV Review: HBO’s We Are Who We Are Makes Being Young An Art
I remember watching Jon Hamm, in an interview, discuss how the world is “youth-obsessed,” which made him nervous as an actor that never looked “boyish.” In a way, he was right. Most television shows are about the beauty of youth, but they can fall into the superficiality of having a face with no wrinkles. The true “stunning” of youth is that dominant curiosity and hopefulness that makes every day adventurousness. Shows, like Euphoria, beautifully capture the promise of youth is not in what it can be but it what it dreams to be, and in Luca Guadagnino’s We Are Who We such a message is clear and sent.
If you don’t know, Luca Guadagnino is famous for directing Call Me By Your Name, which has made peaches become a primary fruit for many. (lol!) Yet, visually and emotionally, it is a film that realistically emotes the pangs and pleasures of being young and having no clue who you are beyond what you want. For this, the friendship between Jordan Kristine Seamón’s Caitlin/ Harper and Jack Dylan Grazer’s Fraser are the heartbeat of the show. The very core of your intrigue to We Are Who We Are lives and breathes according to their wit, spontaneity, tears, and confusion. They are two people in a “lonely island,” or rather military base in 2016, pre-election Italy, and might be the only ones that understand each other’s “crazy.”
We Are Who We Are: Official Trailer | HBO
Part of the magic of friendship is that you find a person who matches and appreciates your “weird” and silliness, of which Grazer’s Fraser totally fits the bill. He is fire to Seamón’s water: he is flicking and burning feelings as if he could feel them singe from his fingertips while Seamon’s Harper is calm, serene, and trying to maintain an emotional flow amidst life’s “storms,”i.e. parents or smothering brothers (a strong Spence Moore as Danny). One thing that I will appreciate about Guadagnino’s direction and writing is that, unlike other teenage shows, the parents of this show are not plain,plot points or foolish villains. They are human beings trying to raise other human beings, i.e. kids, and pray that they turn out better. Yeah! That is rough, and the show progressively displays that clashes born between parents and kids stem from the fact that we are endlessly discovering who we are.
Kid Cudi and Faith Alabi are powerhouses as Caitlin’s father (Richard) and mother (Jenny); loving parents trying to measure when love becomes cutting of their child’s right to express and explore gender and sexuality. Meanwhile, Alice Braga gives solidity and tenderness to the fiery bond between Fraser and Chloe Sevigny’s Sarah: two eccentrics whose love and cruelty towards each other leads to strange, dynamic scenes. Each performer does the most with their material and parental positions to show that being a guardian for someone beyond yourself, for life, is scary, numbing, emotional, enlightening, and stupefying. Yes, those are the feelings of being a parent because you are teaching someone to grow while trying to grow yourself. Yet, at the end of the day, this is a show about youth and how all those “feelings,” in a way, infect them.
We Are Who We Are: Invitation to the Set | HBO
Visually, this show is enrapturing and its soundtrack is hypnotic. It PAINTS youth as if it was meant to be in The Met’s dedicated section to Italian Art History. Imagine! Right next to acclaimed sculptures and artworks lie a bunch of selfies of Harper and Fraser with middle fingers up and tiny liquor bottles. Yet, I wouldn’t mind seeing them because Guadagnino has made two characters that feel like life is a moving piece of art, and are embodied by two actors that can perfect it. We Are Who We Are Premieres September 14 on HBO at 10 PM EST.
