What is the meaning of the last 8 minutes of Kim Ki-duk's movie "Bow"?

"Bow" has been watched several times over and over again, and I always feel like I have a lot to say, and I always feel like what I say doesn't seem to be the author's intention. The good thing is that millions of people watching Kim Ki-duk will have millions of feelings. This is what this Korean director is looking for.

High is high in the law of the indefinite, there is for the law. In this film, which has no dialog between the hero and heroine and takes place on a fishing boat in the middle of the sea, we see the desire of an old man who struggles with his conscience and ends up in despair and perdition. The old man's final plunge into the familiar sea, preceded by a series of preparatory maneuvers, makes it seem as if his death is his own chosen path, as much a matter of order as that of marrying a girl on the day she turns seventeen, as he intended.

I wonder if the old man would have chosen this path if the girl had not met the handsome young college student. Perhaps, it would. Because only in this way could he fulfill the girl and redeem his soul through this extreme way.

The whole movie has a strong flavor of traditional Korean culture. This is best exemplified in the sequence where the old man marries the girl. The two men help each other dress and wear hats. The camera shows traditional Korean wedding attire from the bottom up: the groom has a long coat with a knot, black silk shoes with red stripes, and a sarong. The bride wears a long green coat with a knot over a red round shirt, red silk shoes, a coiffure, an ornate bonnet and hairpins with bright red ribbons, and a red disc on her forehead and on each side of her face.

A pink tablecloth is laid over a two-door kitchen with traditional mythological figures, candles, plants, dates, and two chickens with their feet tied. The wedding begins with the groom pouring wine for the bride and himself. Each kneels to the other, and then to each other. Finally, a rooster and a hen are thrown into the air together. The whole process, though somewhat similar to China, looks fresh, and with director Kim Ki-duk, who is adept at artistic cinema, the movie looks exceptionally gorgeous.

As the boat carrying the girl departs, the attached rope tightens around the old man's neck. For every centimeter she advances, a breath of his life diminishes. Her departure was to take his life. The girl returns, and he hides the dagger he tried to cut the rope with, hiding his cowardice in the line of life and death. The boy who stopped the wedding becomes the only spectator at the wedding.

The wedding took place calmly and peacefully, with the sun shining brightly; it was the most magnificent moment for the dilapidated fishing boat and the most solemn for the old man. The boat reaches the center of the sea, and the girl in her white nightgown falls asleep as the sacred ceremony awaits. The bow flies into the sky and the old man plunges to the bottom of the sea.

Afterward they merged in the girl between the sea and the sky. In this way, all is made whole. The small boat left and the big ship sank. The face of the Bodhisattva in the blue waters hides the secret of destiny.

The bow and arrow in the movie can be used as a musical instrument to pleasure the lover or as a weapon, which starts to be aimed at the bad guy who comes to the boat and is ready to molest the girl, and finally develops to be aimed at the old man. It's really a symbol of desire.

The girl and the bow and arrow ML are actually having a relationship with the old man, with a collection of desires, which is actually a kind of possessiveness. The old man just wants to possess the girl, it's a form of dominationism, and there are many couples in modern life who dominate each other and maybe don't even love each other. The drowning of that ship represents the fulfillment of the desire, and the girl has fulfilled her mission for the old man, and she and the handsome boy will move on to a new future.

Kim Ki-duk's movie style has always been like this, almost no dialogue, the characters use action to show what they think and their contradictory struggles, so it seems obscure and difficult to understand among similar movies, and it also did poorly at the box office in South Korea, but it did win a lot of awards abroad.