Even though a somewhat lesser work than his Mondays in the Sun, Chilean-born Fernando León de Aranoa’s prize-winning Princesas -- his first film since that 2002 third feature -- should impress a wider audience.

Centering on the “local, everyday” lives of stoical bar-comrades in a fishing-and-heavy-industry northwest Spain bedeviled by politics, strikes and unemployment, Mondays asserts the dignity of the common fellow who accepts, and finds the joy in, life and even death. Taking off from a similar labor base, as its title would indicate Princesas (Princesses) concerns women, and in the capital. The girls are small-time workers, too, streetwalkers struggling to keep their lives together while seeing their business undercut by a non-outsourcing aspect of globalization, competition from exotic lower-priced Latina and African illegals in their backyard.

Through many windows, most notably the plate glass of Gloria’s (Llum Barrera) Beauty Parlor, the white local regulars observe at one remove, as it were, the foreign ladies strut their stuff in the sun and reveal their own latent, only partially economic, racism in catty remarks on the rivals’ hair, hormones, body odor, etc. From her window, one of the established girls, Caye (Candela Peña) -- from Cayetana, and a pun on calle, or street -- sees a neighbor’s catchy black “Sexy Girl 69” shirt hung out to dry and, following bothersome blaring music to its owner’s flat, finds a Dominican prostitute cowering in the kitchen, beaten by a civil servant (Antonio Durán “Morris”) who promises to obtain a residence permit for her.

Working as “Lima,” Caye folds, saves and records her euros and is drawn into a relationship with the other, Zulema (Neorican Micaela Nevárez). Stronger and less at the mercy of legal vagaries, the Spaniard discovers the absurdity of her own racial-ethnic stereotyping and, while protecting and palling around with her new friend, learns of their similarities rather than differences. Slightly older, she hides her profession during visits home for weekend dinner with widowed middle-class mother Pilar (Mariana Cordero), brother Carlos (Pere Arquillué) and elementary school principal sister Alicia (Pepa Aniorte). Sleeping in shared rooms which are hers for only eight hours a day, the desperate Dominican hides her work, too, in fake photos and on phone calls home to the Caribbean to young son “little Edward,” whose snapshot she shows off and for whom she eyes a toy truck in Spain’s colors of red and yellow.

Apart from Zule’s rough customer and a more waifishly humorous than addicted “Miss Methadone,” there is no picture of the nastier facts of the Life. Despite some gratuitous, kinky more than outright sexy scenes of streetwalkers prancing and soliciting, and the credited help of Madrid’s prostitutes’ organization, Colectiva Hetaira, León’s screenplay has the women as pretty much garden variety beauty salon hangabouts. The worst they manage is one unthinking call to denounce the immigrant trade, and smug Rosa’s (Flora Álvarez) claim to government connections does turn out to be true though not used for facile plot wrapping up. Zule’s revenge, motivated as it may be, is horrible when one thinks about it but is not made much of in the course of things.

The unconscious working-girl philosopher Caye reflects on their being “sensitive princesses” who pine and wither if exiled too long from home kingdoms, and on life’s casual “detours” that for better or worse turn out to be the traveler’s fixed path. She herself hopes to have found her shy knight in computer man Manuel (Luis Callejo), but that possibility has to be placed on hold and left open. Like the incessant cellphones that should be turned off but unrealistically are left to ring and vibrate at the most inconvenient times, Zulema’s tender moment with a puppyish student-volunteer (Alberto Ferreiro) hangs a loose end.

But life, or fate, demands a resolution. One of the women boards a plane for Boca Chica, “to be with my son; after that I don’t know”; the other will bare all to her family and begin anew, a different detour. Separated by the Atlantic, the two friends exist, “because someone thinks about us.”

(Released by IFC First Take; not rated by MPAA.)