Chance (film)

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Chance (2002) is the directing debut of actress Amber Benson (best known from her role as Tara Maclay in Buffy the Vampire Slayer).

This 2002 independent film also features co-star James Marsters (Spike, Buffy the Vampire Slayer). The film cost $25,000 to make and the writer, producer, and director Amber Benson also plays the title character. Chance was shot entirely on digital video.

Chance actually cost around $100,000 after completion; incurred costs after the movie was shot included insurance and musical score. Filmmaker Amber Benson's production company, Benson Entertainment, distributes the movie on DVD and video.

The blurb on the DVD says:

Chance is a screwball romantic comedy about one nutty girl's search for Mr Right (in all the wrong places). Using non-linear framework, Chance explores the inner workings of a young girl's mind through a patchwork of flashbacks, straight to camera monologue and complete surreality.

  • Running time: 75 Mins
  • Filming Dates: March-April 2001
  • Certification: Not Rated; contains strong language and adult themes.

[edit] Cast

[edit] Plot

Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.

Chance (Amber Benson, who also wrote, produced and directed) is a young woman living in Los Angeles who tries to get by in life any way she can. Narrating her own personal story with voice-over, as well as direct-at-camera narration, she opens the movie by explaining how life is like a movie with someone’s finger pressed on fast-forward. The opening shot has Simon (James Marsters), a bleach-blond, cropped-haired, wisecracking young man whom is Chance’s platonic roommate, enters her apartment one evening after grocery shopping asking if Chance is awake. After putting the grocery bags on the kitchen counter, Simon enters the bedroom and playfully jumps on the bed to wake up Chance only to discover that the woman lying in bed isn't Chance, but a dark-haired, very dead-looking woman (Tressa DiFiglia), clad in only dark undergarments, her facial complexion deathly white, and her eyes open. Simon leaps off the bed and huddles in a corner of the room in shock mumbling to himself.

Over the opening credits, a man playing an acoustic guitar (Grant Langston), whom is known as the Strolling Minstrel, walks down the street into an apartment building to Apartment #1 which is Chance’s apartment. The Strolling Minstrel appears throughout the movie presumably as a part of Chance’s sub-conscious playing his guitar whenever a dramatic moment occurs.

Chance describes Simon as a nice guy, “nice, but too nice.” For he is a push-over when it comes to everything. Simon is shown at his job, working at a office cubical and trying to sell long-distance telephone service over the phone. He gets hung up on, at least until one customer responds to his voice. Simon goes home to Chance’s apartment where he lives and tells her about the woman he talked to while on the job and has a date with her tonight. Chance is wary to Simon’s choice of women, but backs off. When there is a knock on the front door, Chance answers it and it’s Rory (Rayder Woods), a struggling actor and Chance’s former boyfriend who drags her out of the apartment to his car parked in the tenants parking lot. Rory wants an explanation from Chance why she broke up with him after they went on one date. Chance finally relents and tells Rory she does not want to get back together with him for a flashback to Chance and Rory in bed after sex has him talking endlessly to a bored Chance about his life. Rory actually breaks down crying and Chance, feeling pity for him, takes him back to her apartment. Along the way, they walk past Milton (Nate Barlow), a voyeuristic, weird man who lives in Apartment #4, just across from Chance’s. Throughout the movie, Milton appears now and then to photograph Chance as she’s entering and leaving her apartment, and always having a strange leer on his face, which annoys her ever increasingly.

Back at Chance’s apartment, she and Simon do not know what to do about Rory who just sits and cries about Chance not wanting to get back together with him. Simon explains to Rory that Chance happens to be clinically insane, in which Chance explains in a flashback about she and Simon first met. The black-and-white flashback has Chance being committed to a small mental hospital in Santa Barbara for her “inner demons” and other mental issues. After quarreling with an unfriendly and taunting orderly, Chance is taken to her room where because of a computer error, of her name being spelled as "Chase", her roommate is none other than Simon. Simon introduces himself and tells Chance that he happens to be asexual and will not make any advances on her. Chance is skeptic to Simon’s claims. Simon tells her that he passes the time by counting the black dots on the ceiling to see how many there are, and she gets into the routine as well. Having finished telling their background story to Rory, he gets a little uncomfortable about Simon’s bonding with Chance, and leaves.

Simon leaves for his date, but when the expectant woman does not show up for being only a minute late, Simon goes home. Chance further narrates as Simon being time-obsessed. In one scene, Simon refuses to pay a pizza delivery man for a pizza because the delivery man was 23 seconds late with the pizza. Simon is also obsessed with his body odor and tries using any deodorant to suppress his smell. Simon is also a slacker who sleeps on the couch in Chance’s living room and does not know what to do with his life. One evening, Chance goes out, leaving Simon alone in the apartment. He tries watching television, but her TV set does not work. He makes some microwavable food, always counting down the time for it to be ready. At the same time, Chance goes to a nightclub in the San Fernando Valley. When she goes outside to smoke a cigarette (smoking isn’t allowed in any public places in Los Angeles), she’s followed out by Sara, the same dead woman seen in the opening prologue. She’s a random and outgoing young lesbian from Manchester, England, and strikes a bond with Chance by sharing her cigarette, and giving her some Ecstasy pills, and makes sexual advances on Chance, who is either under the influence of the Ecstasy, bisexual, or bi-curious, responds to Sara’s advances. Chance and Sara arrive much later that night at Chance’s apartment both high on drugs, kissing and foundling each other while stumbling towards the bedroom, waking up Simon who’s asleep on the couch, who gets angry for being unable to sleep from the ladies giggling and moans of passion coming from the closed bedroom door.

Further narration by Chance reveals a few weeks earlier that she and Simon went to another nightclub and they saw a man named Jack (Andy Hallett) perform on stage with his singing and Chance became smitten with Jack immediately. When Chance goes outside the club to have a cigarette, she runs into Jack who’s leaving for the night and asks for a cigarette too. Chance and Jack’s conversation starts off as pleasant, but becomes awkward for despite taking a liking to Jack, Chance sees that they do not have much in common. When Simon appears, Chance sees it as her time to go home but gives Jack her home phone number by writing it on his wrist. However, Jack does not have the opportunity or the nerve to tell Chance that he happens to be homosexual, and not interested in a relationship, out of hurting her feelings.

Another flashback shows a visit by Chance’s overbearing and obnoxious mother Desiree (Christine Estabrook) who arrives for a visit. Chance and Simon decide to role-play as each other for Desiree. Simon, putting on one of Chance’s dresses with high-heeled shoes, make-up, thus looking outrageously silly, answers the front door pretending to be Chance, who enters the living room area wearing one of Simon’s dirty T-shirts, slacks, and having scrubbed a fake mustache on her face with an eye-liner pen, play-acts at the loafing Simon. Desiree goes along with it and takes the opportunity to bore Simon with details from Chance’s past. Chance’s mother also persuades both of them to mediate with her and as well as chant from her daily meditation zen routines. But Desiree soon reveals to Chance the real reason for her visit: she has left her husband, Chance’s father, because he has shacked up with a much younger woman that Desiree met at an AA meeting. Desiree wants to stay with Chance and Simon for a few weeks until her divorce hearing with Chance’s father is over. But Chance has other problems when Simon asks to borrow some money to pay off some un-paid parking tickets. Chance caves in and agrees to give Simon the money he needs, knowing that he probably will not be able to pay her back.

A flashback sequence shows Chance’s relationship wth her very first boyfriend, Guy (Shamus Murphy), another young man she was involved with over a year ago, before Simon moved it. Chance describes Guy as a control-freak for he’s always taking things a little too seriously and obsessed with other things like how perfect his teeth are. Guy also persuades the neurotic and outgoing Chance to express her emotions with painting and photography, as well as casual drug taking and love making. Guy asks to borrow some money from Chance to pay off some people whom he owes to, but Chance refuses. But after a pleasant session of sex on the couch, Chance decides to give Guy his money. After leaving Chance’s apartment, Chance waves goodbye to him from her window until a car crash is heard. Guy’s ambiguous death is described by Chance as his mob partners running him down for the money he owes them. She describes Guy’s death as a loss to herself, but at least there will be no more control freaks in her life.

Flashing forward back to the time of Chance dealing with her mother, Simon is still gloating over getting his money to pay off his parking tickets, while Chance deals with Milton still hanging around outside her apartment and taking photos of dead insects on the ground. Chance tells her mother that she does not want to her to move in, but insists that they meet with her father to discuss the situation. Desiree begins throwing tantrums and fits. Chance calls upon her ex-boyfriend Rory to come along with them hoping that he will make an influence over her father’s new mistress.

Chance, Desiree, and Rory go to a marina where they meet with Chance’s father, Malcolm (Jeff Ricketts) and his teenage girlfriend, Heidi (Lara Boyd Rhodes) to have dinner aboard a sailboat owned by Malcolm. The evening becomes awkward from the start as Chance’s father is revealed to be even stranger than Chance’s mother for he’s a vegetarian health freak with a passion for cleanliness. Heidi, although very attractive, is soon revealed to be very dim-witted with her mis-pronouncing of vocabulary which makes everyone, including Malcolm, uncomfortable with her awkward attempts at humor. As expected, Heidi becomes instantly smitten with Rory for she's apparently a fan of the TV soap opera that Rory currently acts in. While Rory talks with Heidi, Malcolm tries talking to Desiree about their marriage and about what went wrong. After some talk about Malcolm admitting that Heidi is not his type that he only took her in at Desiree’s instance for some "experimentation" with their marriage. Malcolm and Desiree kiss and apparently make up. "And on that note…" replies Chance.

The movie flashes forward to where it first started with the opening scene of Simon discovering the dead body of Sara in Chance's bedroom. Chance arrives a little later and too sees the dead body and Simon crouched in the corner of her bedroom. A briefly explained flashback shows the scantly clad Sara and Chance frolicking in bed until Sara pulls out a small aluminum-packet of drugs, presumably heroin, which she suggests they have some "fun in a baggie." Chance declines. But now Sara apparently took some heron and is now dead from a overdose. Chance and Simon debate about what to do with Sara’s dead body with them suggesting they dump it somewhere or calling the police and risk getting arrested for the drugs that Sara had. Frustrated and angry, Chance and Simon begin yelling and cursing at each other until Chance breaks down and Simon embraces her, leading to a kiss, and then both of them having sex on the living room floor. Afterwards, both Simon and Chance are somewhat surprised by their own actions. Chance gets a little angry at Simon, thinking that he took advantage of her in her emotional state. Simon insists that it isn’t true, for he looks for relationships to have rather than sex, and he isn’t like her who dumps people after sex. Hurt and even more angered by Simon’s comment, Chance tells Simon to consider this his first. She dresses and retreats to her bedroom to rat on to the dead Sara about Simon’s judgment of character and if it did mean something by their act of passion. When Chance leaves her bedroom after a few minutes, Simon is gone, having gotten dressed and left. Unsure what to do, Chance drags Sara’s dead body out of her bedroom and puts her on the couch, covering her with a blanket while she goes back to the bedroom with her portable house phone to wait for Simon to call. Waiting for a phone call that never comes.

In the morning, Chance wakes up, enters the living room, and faints when she sees Sara, dressed and very much alive, eating some leftover pizza. Sara is not dead for she tells Chance all she needed was some coma-induced sleep from the drugs she took. She thanks Chance for letting her stay over and leaves.

Chance sits on the couch wondering what really happened when she answers a knock on the door and it’s Milton, who tells Chance that he’s moving out of the apartment building. Milton explains that since she moved in, he envies her for she all these people come and go in her life whereas he has nobody. He tells Chance not to give up on finding the one person to be with and risk end up like him: being lonely with nobody except his mother whom he’s moving back in with to care for her. Milton gives Chance some photos he took of dead insects on the ground and tells her that he believes that bugs don’t die natural deaths for something kills them. Chance, understanding Milton’s quotes for the first time, suggests that the bugs did die natural deaths because they were very old and very lonely and just wanted someplace to fold up their wings and die. After Milton leaves, Chance deals with one of Simon’s very few friends, Johnny (Rupert Cole), a stoner slacker who arrives looking for Simon who isn’t around. When Johnny begins to annoy Chance with his quotes on his favorite food which are tofu cheese hot-pockets, Chance sends him away.

Meanwhile, Simon is lying on a park bench after apparently having slept on it all night. He is woken up by, of all people, Jack who recognizes him from seeing him with Chance at the nightclub he was singing at a few weeks ago. Simon then basically lays out his problems, confiding in Jack about him and Chance and about how uptight and stuck-up she is with relationships and does not know if his night of passion with her was a mistake or if he wants to have a relationship with her. Jack confides in Simon that he does have relationships, mostly with men, but that despite being gay he occasionally has them with women because Jack likes the human company that it’s the thing that gets him going through the hardships of life. Throughout the conversation, there is cross-cutting between them and Chance in apartment narrating to the camera (i.e. the viewers) that how she deals with life and how men change her life. While Chance is shown munching on ice cream, chain smoking, and eating a bowl of corn flakes with beer, she describes how she deals with the hardships of life and about her insecurity with relationships. She feels that if her ‘Mr. Right’ was really in front of her all this time, in the form of Simon, she might consider taking her own ‘chance’ with him.

Simon, feeling better after his conversation with Jack, returns to Chance’s apartment where after a tense minute with Chance face-to-face, he reveals that he does have romantic feelings for her, but had been in denial about them all this time. Chance reveals the same and they both agree to try to give their relationship a romantic try and really find out if they are meant for each other.

[edit] External links

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