Tell me again ...

]Tell me again ... why a movie set in France...about French people...has a bunch of Brits playing the roles

Well, why not? Its based on a novel written in ENGLISH by an Irishman, so why not have English speakers in the film? Whether they are English speakers with English accents or English speakers with French accents seems pointless in terms of verisimilitude.

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It amazes me (and amuses me) when people complain
about French characters being played by British
actors, or Germans being played by British or American
actors with little or no accent (or how about the old
American films where Asian lead roles were played by
white Anglo/Saxons [John Wayne as Genghis Kahn?]).

Yet, pretty much only true Southerners complain about
all the lame Southern accents that are in movies about
the South. Why isn't there an uproar about all these
fake Southern accents. I am from North Carolina
and we do NOT talk like we are from southern Georgia.

My point is - the enjoyment (or lack thereof) of a movie
should be about its plot and its characters, not the
accuracy of the accents spoken by the actors. While the
first few minutes of a movie about French characters who
speak with British accents (or North Carolina mountain
characters who talk like Georgia gentry) may keep me from
suspending my disbelief, if the plot and the acting are
strong, then I will become involved after those first few
minutes. And that's what counts.

By the way, the use of racist nicknames for foreigners
only helps to INVALIDATE anything a reviewer might write.

Maybe it's because of the plot. Do you believe that French would ever make a movie like this one? Almost forty years after WWII it seems that just a few Frenchmen don't keep Vichy traditions. Those two poor investigators didn't manage to find a single person who would not cooperate, but at least not obstruct the investigation. Annemarie even emphasized that she had to ask a man from army to help her, because there is nobody in police she could trust, the whole police is based on Vichy regime and all they do is protect each other. It seems that there are more Nazis in France now then there have been in Germany in 30's...

I don't want to say that France is not ready to confront their history and their dark spots. In fact, I can't remember any other country that has made so many self-accusing movies about Holocaust. Une vie en retour, Le piano oublie, Un secret... and so many others more or less famous.

But while France admits its role in holocaust, admits that even ordinary and otherwise good, honest, kind people made wrong decisions, wrong choices, French authors would never go so far to say that whole country is guilty, and that the Catholic church (in the country where majority is still Roman-Catholic) played major role in collaboration and, later, hiding and helping those who were accused for war crimes. This could be made only by old French "friends" across La Manche... or English Channel, as these authors would prefer to say.