Chances Are

It’s a belief held by some that we are all reincarnated over and over again, sort of like there were only ever a finite amount of souls created (I wonder if they were numbered?) so they have to be eternally recycled. It continues in that we apparently always tend to somehow end up in the orbits of those we have known in past lives – girls can become boys, boys can become dogs, your mother in law may be a guinea pig – but we’ve all been around together before. Chances Are kind of borrows from this line of thinking.

We start in the ‘60s, where Corinne (Cybill Shepherd) and her lawyer beau Louie are in the church and about to tie the knot. His best man, Philip (Ryan O’Neal), picks just such a time to confess his love for Corinne, which is simply shrugged off by Louie with a friendly “I know�. Flashing forward a year, Corinne is pregnant and things are still as gloriously happy in the Jeffries home until the night of their anniversary, and a mistimed crossing of the road by Louie.

We follow him to heaven, where he is desperately trying to convince somebody – anybody - to allow him to return to the arms of his love down below. He’s told how his spirit can be reborn in another’s body, and he’s even offered a choice of prospective bodies – and in his rush to get on with things he manages to avoid what equates to some sort of big and pointy amnesia-inducing injection designed to stop former memories surfacing and causing all manner of grief.

Jumping forward to the present (at the time) day, we meet Louie and Corinne’s daughter, Miranda (Mary Stuart Masterson), and discover that Corinne is still deeply in love with her dearly departed Louie, and has remained faithful to him for some 23 years – she even still makes him birthday dinners. We also meet Alex Finch (Robert Downey Jr.), a Yale graduate who just so happens to run into Miranda before leaving to try and scam a job at the Washington Post. It is during this novel attempt at gaining employment that he crosses paths with Philip, who takes a shine to this kid with moxy and invites him for dinner. As Alex is living in his car he doesn’t turn down the opportunity.

Needless to say the dinner is at Corinne’s house and Alex and Miranda re-meet, soon starting with the romancing. However, a full-on bout of deja-vu besets Alex, and it starts to dawn that things around him are just a tad too familiar – and that he, in fact, was once Louie. An attempt to tell Corinne doesn’t go particularly well, not surprisingly, and Miranda starts to wonder why Alex is going all fatherly on her butt. Basically, the whole thing ends up as one gigantic and bizarre love rectangle – Miranda loves Alex, who loves Miranda but as he’s really her Dad, Louie, it’s only paternal ‘cos he naturally loves his wife Corinne, who still loves Louie but doesn’t realise he’s back in an altogether shinier and younger body, whilst Philip is still madly in love with Corinne and hasn’t done anything about it in 23 years. So, how does it all end up? Duh!

Whilst nothing new or innovative, even when it was released in 1989, late director Emile Ardolino’s follow-up to every girl’s guilty pleasure, Dirty Dancing, manages to be an entertaining and sweet romantic comedy from beginning to end. Some may find the Cybill factor a little hard to endure, as she’s kind of the Volvo of actresses, however with the quite wonderful Rob, Mary and Ryan as foils her one-note acting style tends to become all the more palatable.

For a film of late ‘80s vintage, Chances Are’s transition to DVD is quite a good one. It has been transferred in its cinematic ratio of 1.85:1, and is also anamorphically enhanced. Picture quality is very good, despite a slight tendency towards looking just a little washed out at times, with occasional speckles being the only real intrusion worth mentioning. Black levels are quite strong, the picture is decently detailed and there’s no layer change to endure as it comes on a single layered disc.

Continuing the faithfulness to the cinematic release, the audio is in surround encoded Dolby Digital 2.0 – not that you’ll notice a lot in the way of surround action, however with film’s such as this we have generally come to expect things to be front and centre and not much else. All importantly the dialogue levels are clear and distinct at all times, and there are no synching issues.

The score comes from Maurice Jarre, and it’s probably best described as a typical late ‘80s example of romantic comedy scoring – innocuous with occasional daring tiptoes into jauntiness. It shares time with what many may describe as truly nauseating examples of songs, from the likes of Rod Stewart, Johnny Mathis and Gregg Allman, although the worst is saved for last with the film’s ‘Love Theme’ that’s inflicted upon us by Mr Allman’s former wife Cher and, gulp, Peter Cetera.

Back catalogue releases such as this generally don’t offer up much in the way of extra features, and Chances Are is no exception. There are extremely rudimentary point-form talent profiles, accompanied by those dreaded selected filmographies, covering the director Emile Ardolino, plus actors Cybill Shepherd and Robert Downey Jr., as well as a rather grainy and speckly full frame teaser trailer, which at least carries subtitles in five languages if you’re keen to brush up on your Dutch, French, German, Italian or Spanish.

Chances Are is a decent enough quality DVD release, with a rather sweet and sometimes funny romantic comedy plopped upon it. As far as releases you watch when you don’t feel like seeing stuff blow up (I believe it happens occasionally!) this is a great diversion, and well worth a look – especially as quite mercifully there isn’t a Meg Ryan in sight...