Vidya Balan on playing 'dirty' roles.

Most Bollywood films are infused with 'item numbers' that dose audiences with the glamour and sexuality expected from 'masala' pictures. It's then -- and only then -- that female stars may properly don skimpy, bejeweled outfits and prance around to sensual beats in scenes that typically have zero bearing on the film's narrative. Such provocative item numbers have propelled the likes of Katrina Kaif and Malaika Arora Khan to superstardom in India. (There are no item numbers for men, of course, though they occasionally participate, and usually filmed from the waist up.)

For a woman to portray a provocative character as an actress, however, means being subjected to slander and questions of morality by the same public that loses its mind to Kaif's Sheila Ki Jawaani from 2010's otherwise completely forgettable Tees Maar Khan.

Vidya Balan (right) is one of the world's top actresses. She's appeared in several critically acclaimed films but broke through in 2011's surprise smash 'The Dirty Picture'. Unlike the bulk of Bollywood actresses, Balan didn't progress from beauty pageants to acting. She's a naturally attractive woman, untouched by plastic surgery or liposuction, who'd normally be forced to settle for younger sister/daughter roles. Never the sexpot. She broke free of such conformity in 2010's Ishqiya and blew up the template in Dirty Picture, in which she played a fictional version of a real South Indian actress who scandalised the Tamil film industry in the '80s with bawdy on- and offscreen sensuality.

Indian society is unapologetically male-dominated. Its various film industries -- Bollywood is the one out of Mumbai -- rewards 'bad boy' behaviour and multiple resurrections of careers for its wayward male stars. Women are held to a different standard, and Vidya Balan is the current poster child of a good girl gone bad. How it effects her career remains to be seen, though her most recent film, an outstanding thriller called Kahaani that saw Balan play a pregnant woman searching for her missing husband in Kolkata, has been one of 2012's biggest hits. Maybe her talent and determination will open doors for young actresses seeking fame without shaking their fannies during inconsequential item numbers. Let's hope so.

Balan is this year's 'brand ambassador' (Indians have a thing for awful corporate-speak) of the annual Indian Film Festival here in Oz. She was in Melbourne Friday night to introduce and take questions before a screening of Dirty Picture at Melbourne Central Hoyts in the CBD. Aradhna and I saw Dirty Picture upon its release but were both keen on seeing Balan in the flesh, as we'd done previously with Rani Mukherjee and Aamir Khan when they introduced films in Melbourne for IFF. She was delightful, patient, witty and engaging with a mostly Indian and adoring audience. In the clip above she answers a question about how she handles criticism for challenging not only Bollywood conservative standards, but society's.

(I shot this with a newly purchased Canon Ixus 125 camera that's perfect for traveling but terrible for filming in a cinema, so please excuse thes clip's crap quality.)