Paste: "Quaran-Scenes: 'Cry to Me' and The Man from U.N.C.L.E."
Quaran-Scenes: "Cry to Me" and The Man from U.N.C.L.E. By Kyle Turner | May 24, 2020 | 6:27pm In Guy Ritchie’s 2015 The Man from U.N.C.L.E., when brick wall-esque KGB agent Illya Kuryakin (Armie Hammer) must keep an eye on his crucial contact/cover wife Gaby Teller (Alicia Vikander) in an effort to track down her Nazi nuclear physicist father for both the KGB and CIA—with Napoleon Solo (Henry Cavill) representing the Yanks—all of Gaby’s attempts at developing even a modicum of intimacy with the man are shut down. He’s not good at flirting, with women at least. In their hotel room, she’s left nursing a bottle and he stares at a chessboard, so keyed into a mode of professionalism it nearly renders him sexless. Sloshed, Gaby walks to her room, turns on the radio and tunes into Solomon Burke’s “Cry to Me.” “I’m going to finish this bottle,” Gaby says. “The only question is, are you going to help me or not?” It’s sexual bait, and Kuryakin isn’t biting.