Throughout history, women have survived the stifling strictures of patriarchy by using their own codes of communication — be it intergenerational secrets, whisper networks or gestures legible only to other women. Several centuries ago, in Jiangyong County in southern China, women went a step further, inventing an entire language that they used to write songs, poetry and furtive missives to one another.
This fascinating language, Nushu, is the subject of the documentary “Hidden Letters,” though if you’re expecting an illuminating deep dive into its history, you’ll be disappointed. The director, Violet Du Feng, uses Nushu mostly as a cursory framing device for a broad portrait of gender relations in modern China, structured around the stories of two Nushu practitioners: a divorced museum guide, Xin Hu, and a soon-to-be-married musician, Simu Wu.
The brief epigraph that opens the film, introducing Nushu, doesn’t mention when and in which region the language emerged, or how exactly it was developed. As the film goes on, haphazard scenes raise more questions without providing answers. Glimpses of business meetings about the need to commercialize Nushu lack any context on who stands to benefit from such a plan. We hear a tutor at a regressive “princess camp” for girls praise Nushu as an embodiment of the camp’s values, but it’s not clear how this applies to a script that was developed for sororal solidarity in the face of repression.
“Hidden Letters” compels when it dwells in the everyday lives of its two leads, capturing the stray misogyny leveled at them by their partners, fathers, bosses, customers and even strangers. Like a totem from their ancestors, Nushu evidently helps these women reckon with their own lives and ambitions. But the film’s attempts to connect the past and the present feel too glib, lacking the force of historical detail.
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