World Famous Lover, with Vijay Deverakonda and Raashi Khanna, is on Netflix: A rewind of this, um, ‘writerly’ romance

Years from now, I suspect this truly confused film, by Kranthi Madhav, will be remembered as a footnote in the Gospel of St. Deverakonda. For all its faults, it keeps pushing that Rowdy persona…

Kranthi Madhav’s World Famous Lover has everything you expect from a Vijay Deverakonda Film™. There’s grand passion, grander rage. There’s sulking and self-pity. There’s that Vijay Deverakonda look. It says: I am in angst, please save me from myself. There’s the bleeding on the knuckles, the big, scraggly beard spilling over the jawline. There’s a lot of smoking and casual fucking. (Even if the characters “have sex” or “make love” in a Vijay Deverakonda Film™, you want to call it “fucking”: it sounds way cooler, and cool is the first thing these films want to be.) There’s the entitlement you see when the actor (playing Gautham) asks the household help to make him an omelette: he sounds like a pampered princeling ordering the court jester to do cartwheels because he’s bored. And there’s violence. In the first scene, Gautham is locked up in jail. He stares right into the camera and tells us he wanted to be a writer. Well, he’s got his sentence.