Twilight Out of Focus

Episodes 1-3

I admit it—I was wondering how Twilight Out of Focus would handle the sex scenes. That's not because the manga is the raunchiest BL I've read but because the sex is very much a piece of the story rather than something thrown in to titillate the reader. How would the anime handle it? With the awkward blue skies of Love Stage!!? Fading to black? Excising them all together? As it turns out, episode three answers that question as the anime moves through volume one of the original manga: "artistically." It's not a bad choice. The story is very involved in film—Mao, one of the current two protagonists, is the cameraman for his high school's very ambitious film club and in episode one he tells Hisashi that he can't lie to the camera. That's why he has them film their agreement (Hisashi won't hit on Mao, Mao won't out Hisashi)—because Mao feels that putting it on metaphorical film makes it more binding.

The main action of this first three episodes unfolds against a backdrop of film, as well. Mao's second year cohort is working on their entry for a competition by writing, filming, and producing a BL romance—and Ichikawa, the director, is very keen to have Hisashi star in it. Mao doesn't want to ask because he's afraid that Hisashi will think he broke his promise but Ichikawa bulldozes ahead and recruits him anyway. Mao, who has been uncomfortably coming to realize that his feelings for his roommate may not be entirely platonic, is forced to truly realize them as he watches Hisashi act as if he's in love with a different boy. This is made even more awkward thanks to the whole "inability to lie to the camera" thing and its implications.

My favorite part of these episodes is the way Hisashi allays Mao's unvoiced fears. In episode three, filming the confession scene, Hisashi looks directly at Mao through the camera and changes the lines slightly. He's letting Mao know that he is the person he likes, and he's doing it in a way that Mao specifically will understand. It shows both how well he knows and how much he cares for his roommate, and it's one of the best uses of the entire film theme in these episodes. In many ways, it's much more impactful than the sex scene that precedes it—or Mao getting so upset during the first filming that he trips and concusses himself.

As you can no doubt tell (and probably knew anyway), the first three episodes get Mao and Hisashi together. Does it make the opening scene seem a little silly? Sure, but it then serves to show that Mao was operating based on assumptions rather than actual beliefs when he makes Hisashi promise not to touch or fall for him. (The show does something similar with the unwarranted near-assault later in episode one. Some tropes just won't die.) It's not that Mao was homophobic but more that he'd never thought about queerness at all until meeting Hisashi—and subsequently learning about Ichikawa's plans for the second years' film. There may be an argument to be made that Mao is demi-sexual or somewhere on that spectrum, since he didn't start to have any sexual (or possibly romantic) feelings until he got to know Hisashi; he notes that his ideas about love and sex come from movies. Hisashi, meanwhile, has had a very rough go of it in the relationship department, with first his stepsister sexually assaulting him (for which he was blamed) and then his teacher engaging him in an inappropriate sexual relationship. Hisashi appears to have never had a healthy relationship before Mao and that may prove to be a larger hurdle for them to overcome than anything else. Neither of those situations are things you just “get over.”

If Twilight Out of Focus leans too hard into its artistic filmography at times (I seem to have drawn the letterbox card this season), its earnestness makes up for it. The show is almost shot-for-shot in its adapting of the manga—and it even captures the gangly uncertainty of the teenage body that the manga art does so well. Episode two is the weakest of these three, but with two more romances to be unveiled and Mao and Hisashi's relationship hitting a lot of the right notes, this anime is off to a very promising start.

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Twilight Out of Focus is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.