False expectations fed by tourism and Almodóvar, few are aware that, in the wake of '60s and '70s prosperity, Spain was among the ten most industrialized and urban-dwelling nations in the world. To their loss, even fewer are aware of the fine, often wryly humorous low-key realism of that country's current cinema, often unpublicized and mostly undistributed on these shores.

Best Foreign Film Oscars for 1982 and '93 did not forge a wide international market for Spanish filmmakers, and, though its subject is a serious one, Mondays in the Sun (Los lunes al sol) is too laid-back to do so, either. But this third feature from sometimes documentarian Fernando León de Aranoa is deserving of greater success than it is likely to have. Winner of five Goyas and several other awards, it was Spain's 2002 official entry for the U.S. Academy Awards, which may just possibly open a few doors.

León de Aranoa has spoken of "local, everyday, prodigious stories," and his film script is set in a decaying strife-racked heavy-industry northwest port city. After a number of boom-and-busts, Spain has the second-highest unemployment rate in the European Union. Inspired by events and confrontations sparked by the March 2000 lockout of eighty-nine Gijón shipyard workers -- the Asturias coast of To Begin Again -- but filmed in Vigo and Pontevedra, Galicia, Mondays in the Sun faithfully traces the lives of seven such workers, men in their forties or fifties.

With his Aurora severance pay, Rico (Joaquín Climent) bought the small, barren Bar la Naval, which he and his teenage daughter Nata (Aida Folch) tend and where the other friends gather to drink, complain, commiserate with or insult one another, while away empty hours and fall deeper into listless despair. Of them, only Reina (Enrique Villén) has a job, as a "security technician," i.e., night guard, and he is tiring of footing his friends' drinking bills. José (Luis Tosar) broods and loses self-respect because his wife Ana (Nieve de Medina) has become the family breadwinner; Lino/Paulino (José Angel Egido) sweats profusely at interviews and over application forms; older, Amador (Celso Bugallo) drinks himself silly and speaks incoherently of his wife, gone to visit her ill mother, while immigrant Sergei (Serge Riaboukine) was once almost a Soviet Gagarin cosmonaut.

And Santa -- Santiago (Javier Bardem) -- the thinker of the group, who picks up and discards women, subcontracts as a babysitter, defies authority and ownership, and talks of the need for political action and labor solidarity. The strongest, and also the weakest, of the lot, the most theoretical and yet the most humane, Santa is the center around which they spin, the glue that holds them together, however tenuously. Even he, however, is shocked to tears -- not only at a death that may or may not be a suicide, but at the realization of what he had previously failed the grasp: Siamese twins who laugh at one another, they are irrevocably joined, the fall of one being the fall of all.

A comically macabre situation -- a snatched funeral wreath, commandeered drifting ferry and misplaced urn of whisky-doused human ashes -- is a short story non-ending and at the same time a most fitting resolution. There is no "answer," at least none that will do for every person and condition. Life changes and is too amorphous for that.

Mondays in the Sun  captures the small drama of the individual buffeted against the larger, impersonal, at times theatrical events of local, national and world politics and economics. There is laughter, without which this life would be unbearable, and there is love and jealousy, and fellowship. These seem small things, in this small bar and these small lives and apartments or boarding house rooms, but such is the stuff of most of existence. The film mirrors the mundane, the talky, slow-motion, trivial day-to-day, the obscenities, endearments, misunderstandings and give-and-take kidding of real communication, the waiting on lines and on bureaucracy, the blows to one's human dignity--and the intrinsic decency and warmth that make it worthwhile.

(Released by Lions Gate Films and rated "R" for language.)