EARLY RESPONSES to Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ in Europe are summarized in "Gibson film stirs Euro passions" (Toronto Star). It's too long to excerpt properly, but here's something on France. Spain, Germany, Britain, Ireland, and Italy are also discussed.

But one thing is certain: Gibson's movie continues to arouse passions in Europe � and nowhere more so than in France, where a war of words has broken out between Tarak Ben Ammar, the film's distributor, and Marin Karmitz, a high-profile figure in the art house cinema business.

Karmitz refused to program Passion in his MK2 chain of theatres and publicly denounced the film as "fascist propaganda" for its supposed depiction of barbarity as spectacle, its "revisionist" take on history and its allegedly anti-Semitic representation of Jews.

Ben Ammar, whose newly formed Quinta Distribution releases the movie this week, hit back forcefully. "This is not a fascist movie. On the contrary � 50 million people have seen the film so far; I don't think they're all fascists," says Ben Ammar, a Tunisia-born Muslim. Quinta has screened the movie in France to Holocaust survivors and prominent Jewish leaders. "Not one said it was anti-Semitic," Ben Ammar adds.

French distributors held Gibson's opus at arm's length from the outset. By the time of the film's U.S. release, France was the only major territory for which the picture had not been acquired.

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Then up popped Ben Ammar, who cited his Muslim faith and his credits as producer on several biblical projects � including everything from Franco Zeffirelli's 1977 miniseries Jesus Of Nazareth to Monty Python's Life Of Brian (1979) � as giving him the legitimacy to handle Passion.