Women Travel Alone
Perhaps the ultimate road movie outcast, Mona does not cruise the highway on a sleek motorbike, sporting a sexy leather jacket, wrecking subversive havoc. This European road movie refuses to romanticize rebellious driving/traveling, as most American road movies do. ...Mona is ugly and disheveled; she has no car nor any impulse to drive, a truly distrurbing homeless drifter (Laderman, 267).
The main difference between Vagabond and Easy Rider is our main characters. In Vagabond it is a female who is truly a drifter. She is not attractive and has no desire to settle anywhere. This desire to continously be on the move is evident through the use of the cameras tracking shots. The camera will continue past Mona and onto a different object symbolizing this idea of movement. Easy Rider also uses these tracking shots however, in most of them both Wyatt and Billy are in the center of the frame suggesting that there road does have an ultimate destination, New Orleans. Another interesting difference between our main characters is their appearance. Only once do we see Mona bathe, and that is at the beginning of her journey when she comes out of the ocean. In Easy Rider we see Wyatt and Billy bathing and they look clean and are attractive. This is evident during the scene in the diner when the young girls can not stop giggling about how handsome they are. Another important difference is that Vagabond begins at the end of Mona's life. We already know the outcome of Mona, we know that she is going to die alone in a ditch. Easy Rider hides the death of our two main characters, it never occurs to the audience that they are going to die until it actually happens. Even then we are still so stunned that it is hard to believe.
Finally, by making the main character in Vagabond a woman, I feel that Varda is expressing the idea that woman are more isolated than men. To emphasize this point, Mona does not have her own means of transportation and is forced to hitchhike through southern France. Also, she is alone. Yes, she does drift through and has a few key moments where she seems "settled" but eventually she does leave and is just as alone as she was before. In Easy Rider, the men are not alone because they have eachother. They travel together, do drugs together, and die together, unlike Mona who always was and will be forever alone.