Emma Recchi (Tilda Swinton), the Russian émigré of “I Am Love,” may be transported by her young lover’s transcendent prawns or sudden touch, but she gives herself over to the film’s spotlighted reveries because of a yearning for selfhood.

Guadagnino is “he that aches with amorous love,” as the teenage Cait (Jordan Kristine Seamón) recites Walt Whitman in “We Are Who We Are.”Īfter all, for Guadagnino, there are no simple pleasures: Swimming beneath the surface of the carnal are other, more metaphysical desires. At times, his work even appears to be woven from sense-memories, of your hand wandering along the nape of a handsome man’s neck or clasping a pouch of MDMA in a squalid bar bathroom. With his “Desire Trilogy” of films - “I Am Love” (2009), “A Bigger Splash” (2015), “Call Me by Your Name” (2017) - and now the HBO series “We Are Who We Are,” the Oscar-nominated Italian director has established himself as our foremost chronicler of life’s voluptuous delights: cock’s crow and birdsong, cold drinks on hot squares, just-ripe stone fruit and salt-baked cod.

Luca Guadagnino knows pleasure when he sees it.

Luca guadagnino we are who we are