Twilight Out of Focus

Episode 5

In case you couldn't tell from the opening theme, Twilight Out of Focus doesn't just follow one couple. Episode five, which takes us into volume two of the series, begins the story of the second romance. It brings us a new romance subgenre: enemies-to-lovers. Or at least, Jin thinks his story with Ichikawa is enemies-to-lovers, and honestly, that's probably the best part of the episode. Jin has been getting the sense that Ichikawa hates him from the start – they're rival directors in two different years, and Ichikawa isn't shy about letting Jin know that he thinks his films are garbage. What else is Jin supposed to think besides that the younger boy hates him?

Perceptions can be very hard to change, and that's something that this episode tries to acknowledge. Something that never occurred to Jin is that Ichikawa may have ongoing issues. While we don't fully know what those are, the premise for getting them together certainly hints at them: Ichikawa lives with his sister and grandfather, and when the latter is hospitalized, Ichikawa needs a place to live. The school responds by offering to put him up in the dorm, and the only room with an opening is Jin's since his roommate left on a hockey scholarship to Canada and never returned. Jin is aghast when he realizes that his new roommate is his film club rival, but…well, the Ichikawa in his dorm room isn't exactly the Ichikawa he thinks he knows.

This is one of the best-done aspects of the series thus far. Ichikawa has two different ways of presenting himself. At home, Ichikawa is calm and helpful. This is visually marked by the way he wears his hair down. It shows his relaxed self, someone not concerned with how things are going with school or film club, and it's him in his softest state. When he pulls his hair back, he's the Ichikawa Jin knows – driven, with a short temper and an unavoidable intensity. The visuals go one step further with how his glasses are animated: home Ichikawa's lenses are transparent, while school Ichikawa's are opaque, and the halfway version (when he's working at his desk, for example) has him with a ponytail and clear lenses. It's not so much a split in who he is as it's a change in where his focus and energy are channeled.

It's also completely bizarre for Jin. While we've seen him briefly before, this is the first episode to present him as a character, and it's starting to look like the role he plays in film club is just that – an act. It's not that he's not passionate about what he does, but when one of his friends cautions him not to coddle his new roommate, Jin turns out to be incapable of that. An earnestness lurks beneath the surface with him, something he appears to be at least partially aware of; his comment about how he always has a girlfriend, but they always dump him quickly for not being who they think he is speaks volumes. For Jin, the film may be an escape from being someone who consistently doesn't live up to other's expectations of him, because, as he says in the recruitment short, you can be anyone you want to be in a film, with the unspoken corollary being that you can be who everyone else expects you to be, too.

That's what sets the two boys apart: Ichikawa's two selves are still part of his organic whole, whereas Jin's seem to be fighting each other, with his real self viewed by outsiders as less desirable. Ichikawa may be starting him down the road to fudanshi-dom, but the more important thing is that Ichikawa isn't afraid to like BL and is happy to explain it to Jin and to share his interests with him. More than their budding romance, it may be Ichikawa's personality that helps Jin.

Rating:

Twilight Out of Focus is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.