The Blu-ray disc for Stephen Chow's CJ7 offers a generous set of audio options. But which is the original?
A sticker on the front of the new CJ7 Blu-ray says that the disc "includes both English and original Chinese versions of the film." For the English-speaking audience, this means that the disc contains both the authentic version (Chinese) and a modified but convenient one (English). But a Chinese speaker would immediately know how strange the statement "original Chinese" is. "Chinese" is a broad cultural designation; it doesn't actually refer to a specific audio language that you could have as a DVD track. With CJ7 it's especially confusing because the film was "originally" released in Cantonese and Mandarin versions -- so what does "original Chinese" mean? It's for the same reason that you could never list "original Indian audio" for a film like Mani Ratnam's Guru, which originally came out in Hindi, Tamil, and Telugu versions.
In theaters, CJ7 was released in Cantonese in Hong Kong, and in Mandarin in Taiwan and mainland China. The U.S. audience got the Mandarin version. Soon after its January 2008 release, a Mandarin bootleg was available on the streets throughout Asia. In April, official DVD releases in Hong Kong and Taiwan included both Cantonese and Mandarin tracks. The Hong Kong version also included a Thai dub.
In North America, Hong Kong DVDs typically include the Cantonese track, an English dub, and possibly a French dub for the Canadian market. (This was the case for Stephen Chow's previous film Kung Fu Hustle.) Following the theatrical version, the DVD for CJ7 includes the Mandarin (as opposed to the Cantonese) version, along with English and French dubs. "Original Chinese version" in the case of the North American DVD refers to Mandarin, the version originally shown in theaters there.
However, with Blu-ray, disc capacity is less of an issue and you could in theory have many more audio tracks. Indeed, Sony Pictures' North American Blu-ray is especially generous, including English, French, Thai, Mandarin, and Cantonese audio tracks, all in some form of Dolby 5.1. But with more selections come more questions. For the film buff looking for the "authentic" experience, which is the "original Chinese" version?
Traditionally, this is not a decision North American audiences face, since they're only offered the Cantonese track for Hong Kong films. When Hong Kong DVD versions slip into the States (for instance through the Chinatown market or through Netflix), audiences typically know to choose the Cantonese track; after all, that's the most common dialect in Hong Kong. Some more discerning film buffs will test both to see which version matches the lips more accurately, although this test frequently fails since most of mainstream Hong Kong cinema is post-dubbed anyway.
But CJ7 presents new problems. The film is a Hong Kong/China co-production, shot primarily in China, and starring one of the most verbally-dexterous Cantonese comedians of all time. Aside from Chow, the cast is made up of Mandarin-speaking young actors from the mainland. It was released in two versions in Chinese markets. And listening to both versions carefully won't clue you into the "authentic" version. In Chow's previous Shaolin Soccer and Kung Fu Hustle, the "Cantonese" version is actually a mixture of Cantonese and Mandarin, whereas the Mandarin version dilutes the sonic heterogeneity, which one could argue represents post-1997 Hong Kong more authentically. But it's not the case with CJ7, where one version is all-Cantonese, the other all-Mandarin. In other words, the old tests for authenticity no longer apply.
One solution is to ask the director himself. When I interviewed Stephen Chow about CJ7, I asked him which version he preferred and he unhesitatingly said Mandarin, even though he's dubbed over in that version. The reason was simple: the true stars of the sci-fi fantasy CJ7 are the kids, and therefore to capture the spirit of their performances, we need to go with their original dialect, Mandarin. But relying on the director's word is never a guarantee. Chow could simply have been modest, passing the comedy torch to a new generation of Chinese actors -- a topic which we'd been discussing earlier in the interview.
Those who maintain that this is a Stephen Chow film (he is the director, main actor, co-producer, and co-writer) might argue that to understand Chow's many contributions, CJ7 must be screened in his native Cantonese. And they have a point, especially since Chow as a cultural phenomenon has changed the landscape of the Cantonese language with his influential comedies from the 1990s. But unlike those films, CJ7 is not dialogue-driven -- or at least not driven by Chow's character. In fact, his character in CJ7 is his most despondent, silent character ever.
What this all means is that perhaps in an age of co-production between the various "Chinas," the solution isn't to choose one "original" version over another, but to recognize that in some cases, all are "original." Or more provocatively, all are inauthentic because they all reflect certain compromises and negotiations that arise as a result of cross-border, cross-lingual film production. But together, the Mandarin and Cantonese versions represent the new soundscape of Chinese cinema. Heard alone, each audio track is a compromise; together, they reveal multiple dimensions of a single object.
And that object cannot be properly projected on the big screen since theaters don't offer multiple audio options. For years now, DVD has allowed consumers to switch back and forth between Cantonese and Mandarin, although in the case of Hong Kong cinema, Cantonese is typically accepted as the more "authentic" of the dialects. However, the Sony Pictures DVD of CJ7 buries the film's second audio dimension by not including the Cantonese version. Perhaps a second Chinese audio track would be too much for a disc that already contains the Mandarin, English, and French versions.
Enter Blu-ray. We can criticize the studios' motivations for pushing the harder-to-hack medium down consumers' throats these past two years, but the higher capacity does have certain merits. The fact that Sony Pictures even included the Thai track means there's room to spare on the disc. Of course, there's an economic incentive at play: more tracks mean more potential audiences. But for once I'm going to be optimistic with the studios and commend them for their generosity. Blu-ray is still in its infancy and the studios need to know when they're doing something right.
What they probably don't realize is how appropriate Blu-ray is for big-budget Hong Kong cinema as it transitions from the 1980s-90s "golden age" format, to one that must consider the mainland, either as co-producers or as an audience. In the new soundscape of Chinese cinema, "authenticity" comes to mean accepting all of the linguistic variations rather than choosing one over the others. The most original version is not a single performance, but an archive of performances. In other words, the authentic version of CJ7 available in the U.S. is the Blu-ray.
Speaking of archives, YouTube has examples of both versions of CJ7. Click here for a Mandarin trailer, and here for a Cantonese one.