The fleeting Nordic summer, a respite from the darkness of interminable winter, is “the loveliest time of the year,” the Swedish author Selma Lagerlof wrote, with some understatement, in “The Story of Gosta Berling ”: “Everything was beautiful. The road, gray and dusty as it was, had its border of flowers.” Even “the smallest child went on the road with a bunch of lilacs in her hand, and every peasant woman had a little bouquet stuck in her neckerchief.”

This heady season of bright nights, wild strawberries and pantheistic joy is recalled as a time of intense yearning and elusive happiness, shadowed by an impending autumn, in the early movies of Sweden’s greatest filmmaker, Ingmar Bergman — notably “Summer Interlude” (1951) and “Summer With Monika” (1953).

“Summer Interlude” is a journey into the past. It opens with a montage of the earth in bloom, followed by a shot of windblown leaves. The heart of the movie is a prolonged flashback that begins when a dancer (Maj-Britt Nilsson), feeling old and already mourning her youth at 28, receives a journal written some 15 years earlier by the boy, long dead, who was her first love (Birger Malmsten).

Nilsson gives a terrific performance, both as a high-spirited adolescent and a prematurely world-weary ballerina. Not only lyrical, the movie can be frisky, too , as in the playful interpolation of an animated cartoon . A small film with big ambitions regarding the nature of love and mortality as well as the relationship between life and theater, “Summer Interlude” is alternately melodramatic and expressionistic, occasionally verging on the supernatural. Still, the filmmaking feels fresh and emotionally raw, leaving the odd sense of Bergman already nostalgic for his own innocence.