Experimenta

Bumpkin Soup (aka The Excitement of the Do-Re-Mi-Fa Girl)

+ intro by Espen Bale, BFI National Archive

A country girl visits a strange Tokyo university in search of her high-school beau, in Kiyoshi Kurosawa's playful sophomore feature.

  • Director

    Kiyoshi Kurosawa

  • Japan 1985. 83min

  • Digital

  • Japanese with English subtitles

Pining for her darling, country girl Akiko travels to Yoshioka’s Tokyo university only to discover that he hasn’t attended classes for weeks and his school has turned into some kind of strange, sex-obsessed circus. Flouting genre expectations in favour of highly stylised, exquisitely crafted vignettes, Bumpkin Soup was rejected by sexploitation studio Roman Porno, only to be picked-up by the Director’s Company, an independent venture designed to support creative voices outside the majors. Recently remastered, Kurosawa’s film remains one of the most formally inventive and idiosyncratic films they released.