We Are Who We Are

It takes a daring director to ask us to not just sympathise but empathise with a boy like Fraser. And Guadagnino is certainly that. He has an almost magical realist take on teenage life. Everything is at once lifelike and heightened, his gritty, gonzo approach punctured by freeze frames and fade-outs and fantasy sequences. ... The more you watch, the more that shrug of a title starts to make sense.

An eight-part opus that is guaranteed to stand as an essential work in the director’s oeuvre.

Grazer and Seamón are lovely to watch as their characters enter what seems to be a platonic relationship premised on their gentle recognition of each other’s nascent queerness. ... The writing of this relationship is spare but confident; by contrast, the secondary story lines are sometimes attenuated. ... It’s a transportive panorama of sexual exploration, frank but not caustic, voyeuristic but not leering, innocent and provocative.

An aura of pleasant aimlessness suffuses the production, its evocation of eternal summer mirroring the teens’ approach to their here-but-not-really-ness. But of course the scripts (by Guadagnino, Paolo Giordano and Francesca Manieri) are meticulously crafted, guided in large part by the steady unearthing of the characters’ layers.

The kids sometimes seem wise and mature and accepting beyond their years only to fly off the handle and engage in that distinctly teenage brand of solipsism, where the people around you don’t matter nearly as much as you and your own feelings. They’re able to be pretentious and profound on entirely their own terms, rather than seeming like mouthpieces for middle-aged screenwriters.

The show barely develops its adult characters. One hopes that will come in future episodes but in the meantime the vibe coming off the kids who want to be more worldly than they actually are proves alternately alluring, dispiriting and fascinating, which makes “We Are Who We Are” a tough show to embrace — and impossible to entirely dismiss.

“We Are Who We Are” feels like what it is: European artistes taking on a demographic into which they have zero insight and very little to add. It is, at best, a meandering, mildly lyrical meditation on arrested development – at worst, a head-scratching misfire by an otherwise major talent of cinema.

The show is quiet and captivating with wandering scenes on scenes without dialogue or direction, yet you can't take your eyes off of it. It's beautifully filmed, meloncolic and a perfect depiction of a **** kid coming of age.

I'm not even sure what the hell I'm supposed to be watching. I kept doing the whole "maybe next episode it will click" and then still felt left disappointed after wards and even more confused about the main point or if there even was one. This show is lost on what its trying to convey or what it wanted to do in making a story that kept you clung to the next episode. I was absolutely more relived than excited when I found the last episode. Not impressed and not looking for a season 2 either. There's just too much greatness out there to watch with your time these days - Avoid!

This show is bizarre! It tries to be artsy and meaningful but it comes across as pretentious and unrealistic... at least I hope people aren't really like this. The story is about a lesbian military couple and their son who move to a base in Italy. The son, Fraser, is obnoxious and rude to everyone. He's abusive to his mother, calling her the C-word, slapping her across the face one minute then running to her crying the next, and she's weirdly obsessed with him and lets him behave horribly with no consequences, but inexplicably she is also somewhat removed and emotionally cruel. Although they never say it, it's obvious Fraser is on the Autism spectrum. Frasier develops a friendship with Caitlin, who is secretly questioning her gender, and a group of her misfit friends who are always drinking, stripping, and partying. The LGBTQ+ community should be disgusted at how this show portrays them as promiscuous, broken, selfish, unfaithful, and unstable. Almost every character is unlikable and dysfunctional. Even if you don't care about all that, the acting is average and the director tries to be overly creative/artsy doing long moments of watching someone ride a bus, walk, bike, or sit... It's boring and the fast forward button comes in handy. The language, copulating, and nudity seem forced and unnatural and the this is not even close to realistic as far as living on a military base goes. I feel like this show would probably appeal mostly to the teen and young adult age group but I hope that they wouldn't be attracted to this mess of a show or be influenced by these characters who are completely far-fetched and perverted IMHO.

I would have rated it 9 based on the promises of the first episode, but the further you get into the series, the more you realize this is nothing but a pretentious exercise of style and a bunch of shallow vignettes that lead nowhere but to vacuity and boredom.

I tried. We watched four episodes and felt nothing for the characters or cared what happened. Was so disappointed.