Shake Hands With the Devil: The Journey of Romeo Dallaire
Studio: Film Transit
Rated: NONE
Website: http://www.filmstransit.com/shake_hands.html
Release Date: 2005-09-01
Cast: Roméo Dallaire
Director: Peter Raymont
WorkNameSort: Shake Hands With the Devil: The Journey of Romeo Dallaire
Our Rating: 3.50

“I take pills every day to stay reasonable,” says Lt. Gen. Roméo Dallaire, who in 1994 was the commander of the United Nations peacekeeping mission in Rwanda. It’s a reasonable present-day response for a man who once “observed” the systematic murder of 800,000 people in three months, a man who lived surrounded by rotting bodies while pleading with the world to help or even to notice.

Peter Raymont’s Shake Hands With the Devil, which chronicles Dallaire’s return to Rwanda 10 years later, strikes a sober balance, elucidating the conflict and rendering Dallaire’s subsequent mental torment without sensationalism. A documentary in the truest sense, the movie depicts the bloodstained intersection of a man’s moral life and a nation’s, but it neither asks nor answers the eternal question: Why?

In 1994, “the world was absolutely fascinated by O.J. Simpson’s gloves and couldn’t give a tinker’s damn about Rwanda,” says one of the talking heads in Shake Hands. It’s a bitter truth of foreign policy that war is an economic decision, not a moral one. If a country in trouble possesses nothing of value (not even potential consumers), other countries are unlikely to help. To the rest of the world, Rwanda was of “no strategic value – all that’s there is people, and there are too many anyway,” Dallaire was told by a UN official. Or, in the cynical assessment of a Canadian journalist, “Rwandans had nothing to buy and nothing to sell.”

Shake Hands tries to tell two stories – the story of the genocide and the story of Roméo Dallaire – and it doesn’t quite succeed at either. It fails on its merits, though. It’s not sensational, not strident; the portrait of Dallaire’s mental anguish is neither maudlin nor presented with some spurious New Age resolution. He is left struggling to comprehend a world in which some people hack each other to bloody chunks and other people yawn and change the channel.

This article appears in Aug 31 – Sep 6, 2005.