A dancer, Marie (Maj-Britt Nilsson), who is at the height (and thus sees the end) of her powers as a prima ballerina, under the dreamlike pull of memory impulsively revisits the island of her youth and, in flashbacks, her first and only love. Bergman's breakthrough masterpiece is an almost magical fusion of sunstruck elegiac love poem and dark suggestion. The latter looks ahead to The Seventh Seal and its games with death; and to Sawdust and Tinsel in its depiction of a performer struggling to see her life clearly through a mirror of humiliation. But Marie, an early Bergman heroine suffused (like the film itself) with music and dance, finally will have none of that. Jean-Luc Godard wrote that, whereas he admired other films, he loved Summer Interlude, and one can see this reflected in his films with Anna Karina-the playful cinema (cf. Bergman's cartoon interlude here, and swanlike hands dancing), the doomed lovers, the beautiful survivors. "Paradise lost and time regained" (Godard).