Mauricio Calderón Rico | La miel inmaculada (The Immaculate Honey) / 2025

everybody loves chris

by Douglas Messerli

 

Mauricio Calderón Rico (screenwriter and director) La miel inmaculada (The Immaculate Honey) / 2025 [18 minutes]

 

Although it is never expressly stated, it is apparent that Chucho, known locally as Chris (Valdimir Rivera), has received a stab wound in his upper torso while at work. He explains to his mother (Teresa Sánchez), who quickly arrives from the country to help him heal, that he works at a bar as a bouncer.

    She has brought him her wonderful pure honey to help the wound heal, despite the doctor’s suggestion that he leave it cut to air dry until the stitches have been removed.

     There is only one bed, but it is large enough for Chris and his mother to share it, and it the few short days of her stay, the two again become close, Chris readily deferring to her suggestions and she taking his advice to ignore the nightly cries outside his window from a young man trying to call him out, yelling his name and repeating time and again “Chris, I love you.”

     There is a lovely quietude between the two, as his mother begins to explore the city, and despite her devout religious beliefs, she permits him his space and his lack of explanation of how he has come to be stabbed.

      Eventually she returns to their rural home, Chris promising to visit her.

      He now returns to work, where he quickly perceive that he is a dancer/prostitute in a gay bar. His first customer in the back room is an older man who almost fetishizes his healing scar; and the audiences remain attracted to the dancing bar stripper.

      Despite his occupation and the obvious lies (or we might express it, is lack of full disclosure) to his mother, we recognize in this young man a sweet being, loyal to his mother who only vaguely recognizes that he is living a world that she might highly disapprove of. But Mexican director Mauricio Calderón Rico makes no apologizes for the life of his central figure nor does the mother do anything but mildly express her distress: her clearest expression of the vast difference between her son’s world and her own is when she puts a small placard of a saint in front of the skull that her son has placed on a night table near their bed.

     Nor does the director chose to represent Chucho’s world as a raucous, lurid world. It’s clear the hunky young man enjoys what he does, and is not at all terrified of returning to what is apparent can be a dangerous life.

      Finally, we are given no explanations of how he came to be wounded. But we suspect that it might have been from a jealous lover, the one who calls out each night and who we spot for one moment when Chris goes shopping with his mother.

     We comprehend the lack of explanation of both the character and his creator as a sign of simple quietude and respect. No one need know everything but another’s life. People can love one another, help them to heal, and respect them as beings without agreeing with or even knowing of their private lives. In the end, we too feel a kind of love for Chris.

      Despite the placid tone of this film, however, we can help but notice in the very first scene when his mother Alma arrives, that sitting on his bedside table is a bottle of Truvada, which he tells his mother is a medicine the doctor has prescribed for his pain. Truvada is a common drug for those who are HIV-positive to help prevent damage to the immune system and infections and diseases associated with AIDS. In short our lovely boy Chris is HIV-positive, perhaps the most important piece of information that he has not shared with his mother. Has he also failed to share that important piece of information with his lovers?

 

Los Angeles, October 12, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (October 2025).