Same Love, Same Rain

Same Love, Same Rain (Spanish: El mismo amor, la misma lluvia) is a 1999 Argentine romantic comedy-drama directed by Juan José Campanella, written by Campanella with Fernando Castets, and starring Ricardo Darín, Soledad Villamil, Ulises Dumont, and Eduardo Blanco.¹ It follows a writer and a waitress through nearly two decades of on-and-off romance, set against Argentine political history from the last military dictatorship to the 1990s.² The film won eight Silver Condor awards in 2000, including best film and best director, and it was Campanella's first feature made in Argentina, beginning his screen collaboration with Darín.^{3 • 4}

Production

Campanella had trained in New York, where he made his graduation short and his first features, including a 1996 version of José Pablo Feinmann's novel Ni el tiro del final.⁸ El mismo amor, la misma lluvia was his first film made in Argentina.⁴ He and Castets began outlining the screenplay in 1995, working at a distance over an early messaging program that let them write from opposite ends of the American continent.⁹ The film was produced by Jorge Estrada Mora Producciones (Jempsa) with Warner Bros. among the production companies, and it opens with the Warner Bros. logo, a detail the writer José Pablo Feinmann read as a sign of the times in Argentine filmmaking.^{1 • 10 • 8}

Campanella later described the film as the first part of a loose trilogy with El hijo de la novia (2001) and Luna de Avellaneda (2004): the first about the couple, the second about the family, and the third about the community.⁷ The film also began his working relationship with Ricardo Darín, which continued through El hijo de la novia and the Oscar-winning El secreto de sus ojos (2009).⁴

Release and reception

The film premiered commercially in Argentina on 16 September 1999.¹ It screened at the Valladolid International Film Festival (SEMINCI) in September 1999, where it won the youth jury prize, and at the Oslo Films from the South Festival, where it won the audience award.^{11 • 12} In Spain it was not released until 19 July 2002, after the worldwide success of El hijo de la novia had made Campanella's name there; Spanish distributors had initially passed on the film.^{7 • 13} Its Spanish run grossed 2,804,994.26 euros from 609,731 admissions.⁵

Awards. At the 2000 Silver Condor ceremony of the Argentine Film Critics Association, the film won eight awards from thirteen nominations, more than any other Argentine production that year: best film, best director (shared with Marco Bechis for Garage Olimpo), best actor (shared between Darín and Ulises Dumont for Yepeto), best actress for Soledad Villamil, best supporting actor for Eduardo Blanco, best original screenplay, cinematography for Daniel Shulman, and art direction for María Julia Bertotto.^{3 • 14} Ulises Dumont won the Kikito de Oro for best supporting actor at the Gramado Festival in Brazil.¹² The film was also nominated for the Golden St. George at the 2000 Moscow International Film Festival.¹⁵

Critical response. Argentine and Spanish critics generally treated the film as the formal groundwork for El hijo de la novia. Ángel Fernández-Santos of El País called it a gentle tragedy made in the key and tone of a comedy, praising the gradual three-stage encounters between Darín and Villamil and the film's closing.¹⁶ José Pablo Feinmann, writing in Página/12, called it Campanella's most personal and most Argentine film, noting its debt to An Italian Romance-style Italian comedies and to When Harry Met Sally, and praising Darín's performance.⁸ Other reviewers were cooler: La Nación criticized the final half hour for absurd situations and stereotyped characters, while SensaCine rated it 3.0/5 as entertaining but prone to the sentimental excesses of Campanella's later work.^{17 • 7} On IMDb the film holds a rating of 7.3/10 from about 3,900 votes.¹⁸

Place in Campanella's work

Scholarship on Campanella reads the film as an early statement of the melodramatic method he refined in El secreto de sus ojos: both films stage a character's reconstruction of his own memory to win a second chance at a lost love, and both link individual memory to Argentina's historical memory.¹⁹ Campanella himself has described the film as the start of a career-long commitment to ordinary people and small-seeming stories, saying that even in 1999 it was "poco cool" to talk about emotions and common people, but that these are the emotions his audiences live.²⁰

References

1. El mismo amor, la misma lluvia (1999), CineNacional
2. El mismo amor, la misma lluvia, Filmin
3. La noche del Cóndor, La Nación (9 May 2000)
4. Juan José Campanella, SEMINCI homage
5. MISMO AMOR, LA MISMA LLUVIA, EL, ICAA Film Catalogue
6. Críticas de El mismo amor, la misma lluvia, FilmAffinity
7. El mismo amor, la misma lluvia, SensaCine
8. El mismo amor, José Pablo Feinmann, Página/12 RADAR (19 September 1999)
9. Castets, el otro yo del señor Campanella, La Nación
10. El mismo amor, la misma lluvia, Cine.com
11. El mismo amor, la misma lluvia (1999), Peliplat
12. 'El mismo amor, la misma lluvia' y 'Celos', El País (26 April 2006)
13. El mismo amor, la misma lluvia, Google Play
14. Una comedia romántica se llevó los Cóndor, Río Negro (10 May 2000)
15. Premios de EL MISMO AMOR, LA MISMA LLUVIA, Cine.com
16. Alegre crónica del fracaso, Ángel Fernández-Santos, El País (19 July 2002)
17. Veinte años de romance, La Nación
18. El mismo amor, la misma lluvia (1999), IMDb
19. La reconstrucción de la memoria contra la irreversibilidad del tiempo, Signa 28 (2019)
20. Juan José Campanella interview, El País (March 2026)

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › Comedy and romantic films (individual works) › Comedies of 1995 to 1999 › Black and satirical comedies › Released in 1999

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 21, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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