'World Famous Lover' is a romantic drama anthology written and directed by Kranthi Madhav. The film has Vijay Deverakonda, Raashi Khanna, Aishwarya Rajesh, Catherine Tresa and Izabella Leite in the lead roles. This venture is bankrolled by KA Vallabha under the banner Creative Commercials.
Vijay Deverakonda plays Gautham, a guy who quit his corporate job to pursue writing as a career. He is involved in a live-in relationship with Yamini (Raashi Khanna) and she walks out of the relationship due to his toxic behavior. In order to patch up things, he writes a couple of love stories surrounding the sacrifices in relationships. Whether he gets back to her forms the rest of the plot.
World Famous Lover has a very complex screenplay which is quite difficult to comprehend. The narrative keeps switching between stories written by Gautham and his real life and the connection between the stories to the real-life portions don't seem to make sense until the climax. It's not a crime to keep things under wraps for that long but till then you don't have much happening to hold your attention.
In the first half of the film, the portions between Srinu (Vijay Deverakonda) and Suvarna are a delight to watch. Aishwarya Rajesh as Suvarna is fantastic and at times overshadows Vijay Deverakonda with her performance. The dynamics of an unhappy couple in a marriage have been handled with dignity and finesse. While the engagement is intact until the interval, the same cannot be said of the second half.
The movie starts testing your patience with too many verbose moments that are soaked in melodrama. The second half has a story between Izabelle (played by Izabelle Leite) and Gautham (Vijay Deverakonda) that is set in Paris. While it has a lot of cute moments here and there, they don't sustain because you don't see the romance between the lead pair grow. It should have either been extended to give us a proper feel, or shortened to increase the engagement.
The portions between Gautham and Yamini seem to suffer from the Arjun Reddy hangover, both in terms of toxicity of the male and the acting of Vijay Deverakonda. The latter works to the film's advantage but the former might seem problematic for a set of people. The predictable climax too doesn't help the film's cause.
The film could have been trimmed a bit. On the technical side, Gopi Sundar's songs work really well. In a film that suffers from engagement issues, the songs don't become speed breakers, which is an achievement of sorts. The cinematography just complements the narratives but does nothing special.
What the film tries to do is commendable, and the effort is seen on screen. It had a lot of potentials that could have been treated better to give us a much better product. Overall, World Famous Lover can be tried for the good performances of it's lead actors.