Agent of Happiness (2024) ‘Hot Docs’ Movie Review: Doc Redefines Bhutan’s National Happiness Index (2024)

Can happiness be quantified? In Bhutan, a unique happiness index is fostered among its population. Introduced by one of the country’s kings in the early 1970s, GNH ( Gross National Happiness) is deeply tied to national pride. Thankfully, Arun Bhattarai and Dorottya Zurbo’s wonderful, wise documentary “Agent of Happiness” keeps any tint of jingoistic fervor at bay while steadily incorporating a melange of voices reflective of storied diversity in circumstance that cannot find an equivalence in the odd measuring system.

The film follows one of the agents, Amber, as he travels with a set of questions through the country. In an early scene, the instructor, during a training session, exhorts the agents not to treat the job with the triviality of a temporary one. She may not need to reiterate, though she does, how the happiness survey is crucial to designing new policies since its emphasis has been hammered generationally through advertising and broadcast.

Gratitude about being born in such a country is ingrained to such an extent people prioritize that emotion above the specific and circumstantial. The questionnaire has few inquiries about the number of cows, tractors, and household implements, but its driving spirit is also geared toward gauging the citizens’ psychological well-being. The absurdity of the questions is highlighted on a few occasions more than others, like when a group of road workers assert they have to work to survive and cannot afford to languish in happiness or sadness. Traversing the rural, pastoral, and urban, the film traces a series of pained dilemmas and crises, several of which have an underlying parent-child thread. Amber lives with and looks after his old mother. He is above forty and anguished about crossing the marriageable age.

There’s an unmistakable loneliness about him. On a work expedition, he wistfully looks at a cottage tucked into the mountains and shares how he’d like a similar one filled with his children. A yearning for family life shadows him. Varied domestic portraits permeate the film. Yangka, a teenager in an isolated village, struggles to keep her family, comprising her mother and younger sister, afloat. Her mother escaped a violent, abusive marriage and grapples with alcoholism. Yangka tries to be constantly there for her mother, helping her out with household work and preventing her from hitting the booze. She has her own school work as well as raises her sister. The only respite she gets is making TikTok reels. She is as haunted by the thought her mother may not be around one day as is Dechen, a trans bar performer.

As dazzling a performer as Dechen is, she is racked with worry and fear. Her constant source of support and inspiration has been her mother, who rallies her to move past how others may perceive her and quash her insecurities based on such prejudices. Dechen’s mother is battling cancer, so she is fraught with the apprehension of losing the only anchoring, loving force in her life.

Citizenship and its due articulation are also propped up as a privilege that’s not available to everyone in Bhutan. Amber is born in Bhutan but the fact that he hails from an ethnic Nepali community has denied him access to citizenship, thereby complicating his pursuit of love. Amber keeps getting jilted whenever he broaches the reality of his non-citizenship. As eager and desperate as he is for happiness, it is elusive. He likes a girl and would like to marry her quickly, but she has ambitions of her own and wishes to see more of the world before settling. Their meetings are tempered with an awareness of what he may have initially fancied.

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