Cast: Vijay Deverakonda, Raashi Khanna, Aishwarya Rajesh, Catherine Tresa, and Izabelle Leite

Director: Kranthi Madhav 

Director Kranthi Madhav’s World Famous Lover aims to be an emotional love story that speaks about compromise and sacrifice. Sadly, the film doesn’t have much substance to keep it going for two and a half hours.

Gautham (Vijay Deverakonda) is an aspiring writer trying to overcome his writer’s block. He’s in a live-in relationship with Yamini (Raashi Khanna), an epitome of love and sacrifice. All Gautham does is sleep, eat, watch Tom and Jerry and sleep with Yamini. Eventually, he forgets about Yamini and the world around him and becomes a self-indulgent person. Any woman who has put up with this behavior would vent her frustration one day. When Yamini does that, Gautham’s life goes for a toss. 

What follows is a mashup of underwhelming cliched love stories. It is interesting to see how Kranthi Madhav has tried to weave four different love stories into World Famous Lover. These four stories work well as a standalone film, but when they’re stitched together, it does not appeal as it should have. 

World Famous Lover is about Gautham realizing Yamini's sacrifice and his repentance. Their broken relationship keeps things going in the film, but after a point, it gets tiring as we get to see repetitive scenes. 

The best story of World Famous Lover goes to Seenayya and Suvarna’s (a brilliant Aishwarya Rajesh) rooted love story. Aishwarya Rajesh single-handedly stole the show with her realistic performance as a naive Suvarna. You take a look at her emotional performance and wonder why she hasn’t gotten her due yet. She’s one of the best performers in India, hands down.

It has a major Arjun Reddy syndrome, Vijay Deverakonda is starting to get fascinated with the idea of messy and dysfunctional relationships. As much as you want to treat World Famous Lover as an original story, you can’t ignore the Arjun Reddy hangover, especially in the second half and towards the climax. Of the four stories, the segment featuring Vijay as Sreenu and Aishwarya Rajesh as Suvarna really stands out, and it deserved to be made into a complete film. Thanks to the Telangana dialect and some quirky writing, Vijay’s performance in this segment really establishes the fact that he’s still got a lot of untapped potentials. Raashi Khanna as Yamini shines in what’s supposedly one of her most intense characters.

Arjun Reddy worked to some extent because it was the story of a jilted lover which was portrayed as realistically as possible. World Famous Lover turns realism into a sobfest and it gets unimaginably boring when the story shifts to Paris. In spite of overall great performances, the film falls flat and there’s nothing anyone can do about it.