Panned by the critics and local church leaders, the controversial film "The Passion of The Christ" opens in France on Wednesday after winning a court challenge and getting the backing of a Muslim businessman.
Mel Gibson's graphic film will hit the screens at about 500 cinemas across the country amid loud criticism of its bloody scourging and crucifixion scenes and charges it could rekindle violence against Jews.
The press in movie-mad France panned the film when it premiered in the United States last month, mixing Gallic disdain for Hollywood blockbusters with secular France's suspicions about any attempt to bring religion into the public sphere.
It took a Tunisian-born Muslim, producer Tarak ben Ammar, to promote the film after other distributors refused to touch it.
The last hurdle fell on Monday when a court ruled against three Jewish brothers who wanted it banned on grounds it was likely to fuel anti-Semitism. But the mood is still hostile.
"If God is love, none of that comes through even for a second in this grieving and violent film. Terminator is a mild allegory by comparison," the Journal du Dimanche newspaper wrote on Sunday.
"Fascist...anti-Semite...incredibly violent," fumed Marin Karmitz, head of the National Federation of Film Distributors.
CARDINAL AND CRITICS AGREE
"The Passion" is being shown at an awkward time for France, which has been struggling with a rise in anti-Semitic violence in the past few years. A popular comedian of African origin was recently shunned after a sketch was judged offensive to Jews.
The film's traditionalist Catholic spirituality jars in modern France, where fundamentalist Christians are regarded as political pariahs because of real or supposed links to far-right and monarchist movements.
Another factor expected to dampen enthusiasm is the near total absence in France of evangelical Protestants, some of the film's strongest supporters in the United States.
It is hard to say who has been tougher on Gibson and his film, the secular film critics or the Roman Catholic Church.
"His 'Passion' seems to be based on an apocryphal Gospel according to the Saint Marquis de Sade," the left-wing newspaper Liberation wrote. "His faith is the Shi'ite version of Christianity, his religion soaked in blood and pain."
Paris Cardinal Jean-Marie Lustiger, who was born Jewish and converted as a teenager, denounced the film's violence as the opposite of Jesus's message of love and compassion.
"The Gospel is not The Gallic Wars or Napoleon's Memoires," he said last week. Love of God, he said, "is not measured in liters of hemoglobin and spilled blood."
The Paris court ruling against the request for a ban struck a much calmer tone.
"The film in question, which is a very realistic adaptation of the final hours of Christ's life, cannot be considered an incitement to hatred and violence against Jews or an affront to their dignity and security," it said.
"Making Jesus's death the main motive for anti-Semitism and age-old persecutions of Jews would amount to a narrow and simplistic view of Mel Gibson's film."