Bored adults fill the bleachers for the “passing of the unit flag” ceremony, which sees control of the base formally transferred from General Mcaunty to Sevigny's Sarah, commanding her first garrison. We Are Who We Are belongs to its young cast, but what we do see of its adults’ military lives more closely resembles the overbearing strictures of US public school than the intoxicating laxity of Italy. “They say they do it so we don’t get lost,” says Britney (Francesca Scorsese), a kid who should know: she’s spent her entire childhood in mini-Americas from Germany to South Korea. They live in a miniature America carved into Europe where they’ve exported everything they need to feel secure, from their hierarchies to the layout of their grocery stores, and faithfully reproduced them at bases across the globe. The show’s adults haven’t solved the problem of being lost, but circumvented it. Adolescence is the lost and found, we realize, as he tags along with a group of same-aged army brats, loses them at the beach, gets carelessly drunk in the punishing Italian sun, and struggles to find his way home at night. Is there anything vital inside? Just everything Fraser cares about enough to fly over from New York City.įraser spends most of the episode wandering or searching the base, his new school, and his new city while the suitcase winds its way back to him via Amsterdam. Their first stop is the lost and found to report his suitcase missing. Fourteen-year-old Fraser (Jack Dylan Grazer from the It series) has just landed at Venice Marco Polo Airport with his officer mother (Chloë Sevigny) and his other mother (Alice Braga), a Brazilian by birth. Its characters are guided by tides of emotion, their days determined by bus schedules, high school class schedules, the circadian rhythms of peacetime army life.

There’s not much plot to the series premiere of HBO’s We Are Who We Are, a bildungsroman set on an American military base in Italy from Call Me By Your Name director Luca Guadagnino.

We are who we are episode 8