cult film freak: LARA WENDEL & STEFANIA SANDRELLI 'DESIDERIA: LA VITA INTERIORE'

Written by James M. Tate / 8/18/2026 / No comments / eighties , italian , klaus löwitsch , lara wendel , neo noir , orso maria guerrini , stefania sandrelli , vittorio mezzogiorno

LARA WENDEL & STEFANIA SANDRELLI 'DESIDERIA: LA VITA INTERIORE'

8/18/2026 | No comment

Lara Wendel in DESIDERIA aka DESIDERIA: LA VITA INTERIORE Year: 1980 Rating: ***1/2

Three years after playing a knife-wielding child-wraith in the giallo horror THE PERFUME OF THE LADY IN BLACK, and when German-born/Italian-cinema scream-queen Lisa Wendel was a pretty preteen, she appeared in two extremely controversial exploitation films...

The first, PLAYING WITH LOVE, was almost instantly banned worldwide, and LITTLE GIRL IN BLUE VELVET was another take on Stanley Kubrick's LOLITA (including Wendel getting her toenails painted by a middle-aged man)...

Lara Wendel in DESIDERIA

Making her titular role in DESIDERIA not only the most accessible of her underage promiscuous starlet roles, it slips into an intriguing crime-genre premise, rising beyond the sensationalized tale of a 15-year-old girl (starting out obese, portrayed by another actress), who, adopted/raised by a mentally abusive beautifully-enigmatic rich woman, finds out her real mother was a prostitute...

So the controversy's built right into the plot-line... of a young lady's attempt to become a streetwalker herself: including several shots of Wendel naked, and a few lesbian sequences: one actually involving her own adoptive caretaker, played by gorgeously-experienced vixen Stefania Sandrelli...

Lara Wendel and Stefania Sandrelli in DESIDERIA

With a sinister and perverted, money-managing male bodyguard/partner, and a penchant for including pretty maids in the bedroom, she could have had very her own X-rated feature... yet only appears sporadically once DESIDERIA centers on the curious kid herself...

Providing Lisa Wendel a genuinely intense performance, wielding manipulative expressions blending her baby-face/tomboy countenance with the kind of flirtatiously sensual teasing that ignites men (and women) into the kind of edgy tension where anything can happen, at any time...

Lara Wendel in DESIDERIA with Vittorio Mezzogiorno

Including swarthy, aquiline-nosed gigolo-lowlife Vittorio Mezzogiorno, connected to a mostly unseen revolutionary gang that poor little rich girl Wendel (seeming partially inspired by Patty Hearst) wants desperately part of...

If only these 11th hour neo-noir elements either happened sooner, or progressed along with the controversial sexual escapades — so that DESIDERIA (the girl and the feature) would be more of a thoroughly intense crime-thriller than an awkwardly-edited/novelty-driven time-filler.