SHE'S NO BORAT AND TELLS YOU SO.

Byline: ALEX DOBUZINSKIS Staff Writer

Just like Borat, Kazakhstani student Marina Ginatulina speaks her mind.

The former College of the Canyons student is proud of her home country in Central Asia -- now made famous by British comedian Sacha Baron Cohen in the movie ``Borat.''

When asked if more democracy is needed in Kazakhstan, where the president was re-elected last year with more than 90percent of the vote, Ginatulina replied that the United States is not a perfect democracy either.

``I've been in America for three years, and I say that America needs more democracy,'' said Ginatulina, 32, now a University of California, Los Angeles, political science major. ``Come on, just two parties? How is that pluralism? It's not.

``A large percentage of the population don't vote because they feel that they're going to waste their vote,'' she said.

It's likely most Americans never have met a Kazakhstani. One consular official for Kazakhstan put the number of Kazakhstanis in the United States at only 10,000, and another official said it may be fewer than that.

So it's not surprising that some Americans whom Cohen interviewed while pretending to be a Kazakhstani journalist named Borat seemed to chalk up his rude and crude ways to some vague foreignness. Cohen's comic foils sometimes come off as foolishly polite, other times as rabidly intolerant.

But American audiences didn't let all the fake Kazakh dialogue get in the way of a good laugh, and ``Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan'' had grossed nearly $100million domestically by Friday morning.

Since ``Borat'' premiered, people on campus suddenly began asking Ginatulina about her homeland.

When she attended College of the Canyons in Valencia before transferring to UCLA, Ginatulina was the only Kazakhstani in the International Students Program.

``She came to us totally fluent in English, and she told me that she self-taught English by reading both old and new testament Bibles,'' said Naomi Taniguchi-Ruiz, a program specialist in the International Students Program. ``She's exceptionally sharp (and) intelligent.''

Ginatulina has traveled widely -- she attended a post-Katrina wedding in New Orleans and a ``Lord of the Dance'' show in Las Vegas.

And she has done her own ``cultural learnings'' about the United States, and she likes to quote the poet Czeslaw Milosz to describe America as a double-edged sword (``What splendor! What poverty!...''). After some initial reluctance to pay $10 for it, Ginatulina saw ``Borat.''

``It popped a couple of blood vessels in my eye, but I'll tell you that I went there seeking to be offended about it as a Kazakhstani, but I wasn't,'' she said.

``I mean I would be more offended if I were you as an American. The only authentic thing about Kazakhstan was the flag that they showed at the beginning.''

Cohen speaks in Hebrew and Polish to pretend to sound like a Kazakhstani, and scenes supposedly set in Borat's home village were reportedly filmed in Romania, not Kazakhstan.

Still, Kazakhstani opposition leader Galymzhan Zhakiyanov has said his country deserved Borat's jokes because of human rights abuses and corruption, according to the Reuters news service.

Last year, Kazakhstani President Nursultan Nazarbayev was re-elected with more than 90percent of the vote, in an election that the Organization for Security and Co-Operation in Europe criticized.

Nazarbayev has made it a crime to insult him, although it is legal to criticize his government's policies.

Ginatulina, who was a translator in Kazakhstan and met Nazarbayev through that work, supports the president, who was first elected in 1991. She remembers people eating potatoes, spaghetti and macaroni in the early 1990s. But under Nazarbayev, the economy has grown, and people can buy things such as cars, she said.

``We have traffic jams, and we never had traffic jams,'' she said. ``It's a good thing.''

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2 photos

Photo:

(1 -- color) ``It popped a couple of blood vessels in my eye, but I'll tell you that I went there seeking to be offended about it as a Kazakhstani, but I wasn't,'' Marina Ginatulina says about the movie ``Borat.''

(2) Marina Ginatulina is a UCLA student from Kazakhstan in the United States on a student visa. She previously attended College of the Canyons in Santa Clarita. She has seen the movie ``Borat'' and has her own ideas on the movie and the United States.