Its impact heightened by the force of personal memory, Regentropfen is the best feature we have seen yet on the subject of German Jews under the Third Reich. Harry Raymon supplied the material for the original screenplay by recounting to co-writer/director Michael Hoffmann his own recollections of life in a provincial German town before his family emigrated to the U.S. The result is a film structured around images - of faces, postures, expressions, movements; of kitchens, studies, seder tables and food - all conveying a remarkable authenticity of atmosphere in telling the "simple" story of one Jewish family in the year 1933. Max and Rose Goldbach have a son, Bennie. As Bennie goes about discovering his child's world, his family is simultaneously discovering a "new" Germany - and reacting, at first, with the same adaptability as is a child's province. As things worsen, however, even Bennie's wide-eyed acceptance is challenged; denied entrance to movie theaters and access to his former school friends, he is ultimately discouraged from leaving the house at all. The Goldbachs give up home and shop, and move to Cologne, where they study English at the Pension Cohen while they await, along with other pensioners, emigration visas to the U.S. Visas are denied the family on charges, trumped up by U.S. officials, of physical disability. This is all that happens in Regentropfen, a completely engrossing story which "goes nowhere"; the viewer is all the more caught short at the implication of the denial of visas to this one family. For throughout the film, an enormous energy has been expended (as it must have been in life) to strike a balance between a constant sense of danger and the living of life itself, and it is this effort that comprises the film's focus. With a realism born of extreme sensitivity, Regentropfen captures the patterns and concerns of Jewish life (the clever script is laced with Yiddish, as are the subtitles). At the same time, through its dream/memory-like images (rather than through character development), the film records the eroding effect on family and community relationships of the political monster which here speaks for itself over radio and in small acts of village terrorism. Rose Goldbach, the first in the family to "know," is all but consumed with a sense of tsuris to which her relationships with Max and Bennie must bow. Others, like the characters inhabiting the Pension Cohen, have a less direct reaction, the result being a host of neuroses particular to the situation, though no more sympathetic for that. None of these characters is romanticized, none immortalized in this small film which, for its limited parameters, tells more than any of its predecessors about the way things were. (JB)