Seaside’s Luis Camara scripted a movie playing nationwide.

There is a movie at Maya Cinemas – sandwiched among blockbusters like Logan and The Lego Batman Movie, and vibrant black films like Fences, I Am Not Your Negro and Hidden Figures – that has special significance to us folks in Monterey County.

It’s based on a novel by Mexican author Jose Agustin, and stars Gael García Bernal (Babel, The Motorcycle Diaries) and promising Spanish actress Verónica Echegui. It’s mostly in Spanish, but much of it is set in the U.S.

It’s called You’re Killing Me Susana. It’s traveled a long way to get here, but its brief local presence ends next week.

In it, Bernal plays a self-centered, immature, womanizing husband to Echegui’s fed-up young wife, who finally leaves him in their Mexico City apartment to pursue her dream of becoming a writer at a fictionalized Iowa Writer’s Workshop. He eventually finds out where she’s gone and flies out there. But she’s restarted her life already, and he desperately tries to pry a place for himself into it without changing his messed-up habits.

Much of the movie rides on the tracks of the volatile relationship between Bernal and Echegui’s characters, their awkward maneuverings in this snowy Midwest backdrop of academia, keen observations of modern Mexican young adults, and waves of intimacy, humor and sex.

The screenplay was written by Luis Camara, a Seaside resident and film professor at CSU Monterey Bay’s Cinematic Arts Department (disclosure: of which my wife is the chair). Camara says his movie career started in his native Mexico City.

“I was an avid filmgoer and lover of films since a young child,” he says.

One of his defining experiences was when his parents took him to see the gripping and visceral 1953 French-Italian film The Wages of Fear – on a school night. His mother’s dental practice was next to a movie theater so he would sneak in to watch films he admits he probably shouldn’t have been seeing.

“I got obsessed with movies,” Camara says.

He wanted to make them, so he pursued a masters degree at the American Film Institute in Los Angeles, and began writing them. He knew that director Roberto Sneider, also from Mexico, had gone there and had formed a production company, so Camara called him out of the blue and asked for money to make a film: “He said no. Understandably.”

Later, Camara did editing work on some of Sneider’s commercials, which led to a professional relationship, which led to Sneider asking in 2001 if he might adapt a book Sneider wanted to direct, Ciudades Desiertas by Agustin, who was part of a Mexican writing movement called “La Onda” – comparable to the American Beat writers and poets.

Camara did an adaptation. In the intervening 15 years, he wrote for other people, directed a few short and feature films himself, reworked the adaptation many times with Sneider (who produced Julie Taymor’s Frida), started a family and began teaching.

Then the stars of timing, availability and funding aligned, clearing a path for the movie to be made. Which called for yet another rewrite. Relations between the U.S. and Mexico had changed dramatically since the 1970s and ’80s when Agustin wrote his novel.

“The U.S. was more protectionist then. There was more tension,” Camara says. “When we were writing the film, in the 2000s, relations were very good. After the free trade agreement, Starbucks, Walmart, cable networks like HBO and VH-1, all of a sudden were part and parcel of Mexico.

“Now, with the Trump administration, the relationship has soured.”

He says he may extract some lessons from this long-lasting project for his students: When adapting a work, even one by a beloved writer, you can’t be too reverent. There are only two people you should want to please – yourself and the director. You can be so close to something that you lose sight of it. A great actor (like Bernal) can elevate your material in ways you haven’t imagined.

The film has garnered a respectable 75-percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes, and it opened on 600 screens in Mexico and in about 40 cities in the U.S.

Although a screenwriter, Camara says before the narrative story element kicks in, it’s the manipulation of space, time and images that conjures magic. And he theorizes why films hold such a special place in human culture.

“Life is chaotic, so we watch stories to impose order to the chaos,” he says. “We’re all mortal and we don’t get a second chance so we vicariously live out every decision humans can make through stories.”

YOU’RE KILLING ME SUSANA • Directed by Roberto Sneider • Starring Gael García Bernal, Verónica Echegui, Ashley Grace • Not rated • 100 min. •At Maya Cinemas