Imagine if your government was, even superficially, concerned with your happiness. While so many countries use the boogeyman of The Economy to distract its people from the atrocities of the world (sometimes committed by those very countries), Bhutan, brilliantly, found a far buzzier acronym than Gross Domestic Product. It tracks Gross National Happiness. No more worrying about vague manipulable factors like inflation or the unemployment rate—just ask yourself, “Am I happy?” Ok, to be fair, Arun Bhattarai and Dorottya Zurbó’s documentary Agent of Happiness makes it clear that it’s a lot more complicated than that (and just as made up as stock prices). But even if the Bhutanese government doesn’t really care if its people are happy, posing this question to its populace is at least a diversion that encourages introspection. Those on the front lines, collecting this data for the government, are professionally confronted by life’s biggest question, interpreted by people from all walks of life. The quiet, intimate charms of Agent of Happiness pulse from this poignant collective consideration, filtered through the personal experience of a professional happiness inspector.
Amber and his coworker drive around the mountainous countryside, looking for folks whose lives they can translate into numbers, recorded on forms and diluted down to a single digit through their job’s complex happiness formula. These census-takers strike a memorable image, in their plaid knee-length gho, white tego underneath with sleeves rolled back, black baseball caps and tall socks. Door-to-door style-wise, Mormons have nothing on Bhutanese government officials. As Amber plays air guitar in the passenger seat and chats about his lacking love life, Agent of Happiness immerses us in a doc that’s partially invested in the day-to-day of a unique profession, partially enraptured by the beauty of Bhutan’s bright colors and vast vistas, and partially surprised to have found itself on a buddy-comedy road trip.
With Amber leading the way, Agent of Happiness was never going to be a simple, dry look at a unique piece of geopolitical trivia. He’s a wistful romantic, a total softie who tears up recounting his dreams and cuts a rug at the drop of a hat. Through elegant conversations during working hours (Bhattarai and Zurbó stay out their doc, letting information naturally flow from their subjects), Amber reveals his desperation to find a wife. A youth spent rising and grinding has looked up and found that it’s grown into lonely middle-age. Amber’s now stuck on the wrong side of the dating game, his own matrimonial clock ticking as he asks others about their satisfying lives and cares for his aging mother—clipping her nails and combing her hair—while his off-screen siblings have their own families.
On top of his desire for marriage is his desire for citizenship. The brutal Bhutanese ethnic cleansing of Lhotshampa (ethnic Nepalis), codified in the Bhutan Citizenship Act of 1985, has displaced (in the best cases) over 100,000 people. Amber lost his rights as a citizen when he was just a child, and he’s been petitioning the very government he works for ever since. This festering contradiction at the heart of Agent of Happiness gives the doc a bitter bite, and encourages our skepticism if the phrase “Gross National Happiness” didn’t already set off our propaganda alarm bells.
This struggle, though deeply connected to both Amber’s professional and personal lives (leaving the country for a vacation is impossible; he can’t get a passport), can feel shoehorned: It’s thematically essential, but hard to introduce as organically as the interview subjects or the GNH process. I mean, Bhutan broadcasts a commercial specifically telling its viewers to cooperate with the GNH, emphasizing the government’s investment in its people and literally writing out the mathematical formula legitimizing this care. It’s a little creepy, but at least it’s a convenient tool for a documentary. Every once in a while, Bhattarai and Zurbó simply cut back to Amber’s plight with his nation, watching him workshop his pleas in the hopes that this time will make the difference.
As Amber writes these letters to the King who allegedly cares so much about his people’s happiness, he collects data for his government’s press releases. A massive and unexpected array of factors contribute to this calculus—like number of cows owned, amount of trust held in your neighbors, the date of the last time you cried—summarized and neatly displayed on-screen after the interviews as either punchlines or gut-punches. It’s the doc’s single instance of intentionally visible style and each rundown elicits an emotional reaction once we’ve gotten to know those it represents.
The workers interview a broad cross-section of the population: A man chopping wood in a village, truck drivers parked in a lot, a guy with three wives, a kid and her alcoholic mom, a trans dancer in the city. With little coaxing, these subjects take the opportunity to open up. Even if Bhutan is using GNH as a national marketing stunt, the data collection process seems to function like a single serving of therapy. Hearing the crushing details of a girl molding her life around her mother’s drinking problem gets a tearjerking cap when you see their resilience summed to a higher numerical total than you’d ever expect. On the other side of this, the polygamous braggart rates himself and his wives as perfect 10s across the board when they’re spoken to as a group; the women, interviewed privately, crack each other up at his buffoonery. It’s a knowing, funny jab at pompous patriarchy, tinged with the depressing resignation of these women who’ve committed to being with a man they can’t stand.
We see more into some lives than others, like the dancer and her affirming mom, until the third act wavers between backtracking to those we’ve seen before and digging deeper into Amber’s burgeoning relationship with a woman we don’t get much sense of. The once-engaging and pointed juxtaposition between the desires of interviewees and interviewer fades into montage and shorthand once its compelling dynamic is established, the finale getting more wishy-washy when it needs closure as confident as those on-screen reports.
My partner recently got invested in learning about Blue Zones, the places around the world alleged to have exceptional longevity among its people. Whole initiatives and, of course, companies have been formed to investigate these old folks and their lifestyles, trying to suss out how they’re sticking around for so long. As lines are drawn between broad cultural similarities in Japanese villages, remote Greek islands and Costa Rican peninsulas (they all eat beans, I guess?), you get the same vague sense you get when Bhutan’s happiness agents are assigned to calculate their tell-all numbers. You get the itching sensation in the back of your mind that, not only is it not even close to as simple as these organizations make it out to be, this simplification has an ulterior motive of some kind. Like that, lest we risk exploitation, the quantified quality and duration of our lives shouldn’t be left up to governments, businesses or anyone besides ourselves. As we watch everyday people think deeply about this high-stakes satisfaction survey, the act of asking our friends and neighbors how they’re doing—how they’re really doing—develops an alluring grassroots appeal beyond the bragging rights of institutions. Agent of Happiness, with its personal point-of-view and delightfully candid discussions, motivates us to use our compassion for individuals to see past this façade.
Director: Arun Bhattarai, Dorottya Zurbó
Release Date: January 19, 2024 (Sundance)
Jacob Oller is Movies Editor at Paste Magazine. You can follow him on Twitter at @jacoboller.
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