Macho (2016) has a fun premise: Evaristo (Evo), a fashion designer who's built his career on pretending to be gay, is on the verge of being discovered as a "closet heterosexual." To save his business empire, Evo decides to pretend to date his gay assistant, Sandro.
It starts out as an okay movie, but about halfway through, it really nosedives. Not only was this movie not funny, not only did the acting suck, but one of its scenes actually upset me so much that I had to pause and walk away. One moment Evo and Sandro are hanging out together and getting along great to a backdrop of happy music. The next moment, Sandro is curled up on the ground and Evo is kicking him--really violently kicking him--and yelling homophobic slurs at him. A few seconds later Evo apologizes, implying as he does so that he wasn't in control of himself, and exits with an, "I'm bipolar!"
To rub salt in the wound, Evo also talks in this movie about the "gay privileges" that motivated him to pretend to be gay while building up his business. The man who beats up a guy for being gay has the nerve to talk about gay privilege.
What's more, it never seems to matter that Evo did this. Afterwards, the movie continues to pursue a rom-com storyline between Evo and Sandro and does not really ever address the fact that he physically assaulted Sandro. In another genre, this could be the start of a story about domestic violence. As it was, I still felt that there was nothing comedic about this very jarring scene.
I understand that much of the comedy of this movie comes from (a) the various exaggerations of emotion and plot points and (b) the premise of Evo being a homophobic straight man faced with having to date a man because of the hole he's dug himself into with lying. I get that. I expected some of that going into this movie. I read the summary on Netflix. But this moment crossed a line, and the movie never makes up for it. I don't know if it even could.
There are many other things that made this movie suck (I won't go into it all--spoilers), but that was definitely the worst part, for me as a queer person. I would not recommend this movie.
