A day at the beach opens Outfest

Outfest 05, the 23rd annual Los Angeles Gay & Lesbian Film Festival, long a major event on the movie calendar, opens tonight with a gala premiere at the Orpheum of Olivier Ducastel and Jacques Martineau’s sexy, sophisticated crowd pleaser “Cote d’Azur.”

An attractive couple, Beatrix (Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi) and Marc (Gilbert Melki), vacation at a seaside villa with their two teenage children, Charly (Romain Torres) and Laura (Sabrina Seyvecou). Laura is quickly off to Portugal with her biker boyfriend; Beatrix is pursued by her ardent lover and Charly by an amorous best friend. But who really is straight and who really is gay is not as clear as the free-spirited Beatrix believes. “Cote d’Azur” is the kind of sly trifle the French carry off effortlessly.

Before the screening, writer-director Gregg Araki will be presented with the ninth annual Outfest Achievement Award from his “Mysterious Skin” stars, Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Brady Corbet. The Directors Guild of America will serve as headquarters for the festival, which runs through July 18 at various venues.

Joaquin Oristrell’s “Unconscious” (Regent Showcase, Monday) imagines that the teachings of Freud struck 1913 Spain with the impact of a mega-earthquake in this amusing but overlong Art Nouveau sex farce. Just before he is to introduce Freud at a gathering, a Barcelona psychiatrist (Alex Brendemuhl) disappears, forcing his progressive -- and pregnant -- wife (Leonor Watling) to play detective, with the reluctant help of her stuffy brother-in-law (Luis Tosar), who’s unhappily married to her lesbian sister (Nuria Prims). The only clue the missing psychiatrist leaves is a thesis on hysteria and female sexuality based on four patients. Unfortunately, Oristrell wastes time on exploring these cases when it turns out that Brendemuhl’s and Prims’ adventures, plus Watling and Tosar’s mutual attraction and further family shenanigans, provide more than enough material.

Much of Craig Chester’s good-hearted love story “Adam & Steve” (Ford Amphitheatre, Wednesday) is silly and contrived, but the film boasts four engaging actors, including Chester. In 1987, a shy goth kid, Adam (Chester), and a go-go dancer, Steve (Malcolm Gets), meet at a Manhattan disco and experience a disastrously aborted one-night stand. Seventeen years later they cross paths and, not recognizing each other, fall in love. Crucial to their story are their best friends, Adam’s pal Rhonda (Parker Posey), a comedian who has lost her inspiration, and Steve’s cynical straight pal Michael (Chris Kattan). Chester’s humor is decidedly hit-and-miss, but he’s a shameless heart-tugger.

Intrigued by the fact that one of Sidney Lumet’s finest films, “Dog Day Afternoon” (1975), was based on a true story, documentarian Walter Stokman tracked down John Wojtowicz, whose 1972 attempt to hold up a Brooklyn bank to pay for a sex change operation for his lover, Ernest Aron, led to a 14-hour standoff with police and FBI agents. Now hefty and silver-haired, Wojtowicz, portrayed by Al Pacino on screen, proved to be volatile but cooperative enough that Stokman’s phone conversations with him provided colorful, if increasingly dubious, counterpoint to the calm accounts from hostages and, especially, retired FBI agent James Murphy, who ended the standoff with no one harmed.

Irony, humor and pathos emerge in Stokman’s “Based on a True Story” (DGA, Friday). Wojtowicz declares that he never wanted Aron to have the operation but that he staged the holdup because his lover would have killed himself without the surgery. Ironically, the money Aron was paid by Warner Bros. for the right to depict him in the film underwrote his gender reassignment. In a sense, Wojtowicz did save Aron’s life, yet Aron, who died of AIDS in 1987, refused contact with him after he served his sentence and said in a TV interview that he “ruined my life.”

Back from beyond

Tonight at the Egyptian, the American Cinematheque’s Alternative Screen presents Bill Rose’s “The Loss of Nameless Things,” a documentary as eloquent as its title. It’s a harrowing account of the rise of Oakley Hall III, a charismatic, immensely promising director-playwright who had formed a celebrated acting troupe in the Catskills. In 1978, at age 28, feeling under increasing pressure and fueled by drugs and alcohol, Hall mysteriously plunged from a bridge into a stream, leaving him disfigured and brain damaged. After years in a twilight zone, Hall -- with surgery restoring his looks, and with his memory improving under the attention of a remarkable woman -- is becoming a whole man to a degree that no one who knew him thought possible.

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Screenings

Outfest 05

* “Cote d’Azur”: 8 tonight, Orpheum, 842 S. Broadway, L.A.

* “Unconscious”: 8 p.m. Monday, Regent Showcase, 614 N. La Brea Ave., L.A.

* “Adam & Steve”: 8:30 p.m. Wednesday, John Anson Ford Amphitheatre, 2580 Cahuenga Blvd., Hollywood

* “Based on a True Story”:

9:30 p.m. Friday, Directors Guild of America, 7820 Sunset Blvd., L.A.; 5 p.m. July 15, Village at Ed Gould Plaza, 1125 N. McCadden Place, L.A.

Info: (213) 480-7065, www.outfest.org

Alternative Screen

* “The Loss of Nameless Things”: 7:30 p.m. today, Egyptian Theatre, 6712 Hollywood Blvd., Hollywood

Info: (323) 466-FILM, americancinematheque.com