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Based on four short stories by Birgit Tengroth, who also plays Viola, this early Bergman film foreshadows his later, more successful works, focusing on the introspective life of women. Rut (Eva Henning), a neurotic ballet dancer, and her husband Bertil (Birger Malmsten) are travelling from Switzerland to Sweden across war-torn Germany. As they travel they argue bitterly over his love affairs and her inability to conceive, the result of a previous abortion - in between handing food out of the train windows to starving Germans. Meanwhile, a partially obscured love triangle emerges as the focus shifts to Viola, Bertil's mistress, who is wandering through the streets of Stockholm on a midsummer night, having been dismissed as insane by a psychiatrist who tried but failed to seduce her. By chance she meets an old school friend, Valborg (Mimi Nelson), a lesbian who also attempts seduction - with tragic consequences.

A psychological drama of the type director Ingmar Bergman would become famous for later in his career, THREE STRANGE LOVES was adapted for the screen by Herbert Grevenius from four short stories by source writer Birgit Tengroth. In this film, Bergman depicts the three heroines' emotional struggles with astuteness and finesse. Rut and Bertil, played by Eva Henning and Birger Malmsten (Bergman's leading man of choice in several of his early features), play a couple whose marriage is in a detrimental state because of their inability to conceive a child. During the train ride home after a vacation spent in Italy, they express their loathing for one another, and Bergman then introduces (in flashback) Bertil's former lover Viola (Tengroth), whose unhappy involvement with a manipulative psychologist (Hasse Ekman) and a lesbian dancer (Mimi Nelson) mirrors Rut's own romantic disappointments and emotional despair. (As in the director's much acclaimed psychodrama PERSONA, the two women's personalities eventually appear to merge.) The arts--especially the performing arts--as an insufficient vehicle for self-actualization (the central three female characters in this film were all once aspiring ballerinas) is a recurring theme in the Bergman canon, and ballet in particular is the artistic medium also featured in SUMMER INTERLUDE.