Summer Interlude 1951

Marie Maj-Britt Nilsson is a celebrated yet emotionally distant prima ballerina in her late twenties. On a tense dress rehearsal for Swan Lake, she is unexpectedly handed the diary of her first love, Henrik Birger Malmsten, a college boy she met thirteen years earlier at the summer home of her Aunt Elisabeth Renée Björling and Uncle Erland Georg Funkquist. With the rehearsal delayed until evening, she travels by boat to the island where that carefree summer still lives in memory, revisiting the playful bond they shared.

Three days before the end of that summer thirteen years ago, Henrik is severely injured after diving from a cliff and dies. Her Uncle Erland, not actually a relative but a family friend and admirer of Marie’s mother, takes her away for the winter and helps her to put up a wall to dull the pain of losing her lover. He has kept Henrik’s diary since that hospital day when Henrik died. Marie comes to suspect that Erland manipulated events and that he may have taken advantage of her grief, and she expresses regret and disgust that she ever allowed him to touch her, implying they had an affair after Henrik’s death.

Following the evening dress rehearsal, the ballet master recognizes her single-minded devotion to dancing and understands her internal conflict. She then speaks with her current lover, a journalist named David, with whom she seems to be breaking up. Marie decides to let David read Henrik’s diary and to open up to him about her past—the torn emotions and conflicted feelings that have cooled her otherwise warm nature. After David leaves, she removes her makeup and, in the quiet, she glimpses a younger, more carefree self in the mirror, smiling again and playfully contorting her face.

At the premiere, during the ballet’s first performance, Marie meets David in the wings, now more understanding of her past. She shares a kiss with him and returns to the stage to finish the ballet, the note of the past finally aligning with the present as she completes the performance with renewed emotion.