In Sartre's screenplay Les Jeux sont faits, filmed by Jean Delannoy in 1947, two recently killed characters are given the opportunity to return from the dead and to make up for their past mistakes. Can they learn from their errors and deflect the course of reality, or is it, as the film's title suggests, always already too late? Žižek's account of the 'second chance' in The Fright of Real Tears (2001) rests upon a vision of multiple alternative realities, each of which is deeply contingent in its make-up. A Lacanian 'passage to the act', in the sense of a radical disruption of the apparent prison-house of the symbolic order, is never foreclosed, even if it is also never guaranteed. Sartre's screenplay, on the other hand, offers his characters a second chance only to oblige them to repeat the same errors. The paper will discuss how Sartre's screenplay explores the ethical and political implications of the second chance, and it will examine ways in which the issues of freedom and contingency are differently understood in existentialist and postmodern contexts.