Agent Of Happiness

If you think a “happiness survey” is something you might just idly click on for a laugh if you came across it on Yougov or Facebook, think again. In the South Asian country of Bhutan it’s a serious statistical business.

In the late Seventies, King Jigme Singye Wangchuck decided it was a vital indicator of progress and introduced the Gross National Happiness Index. The way happiness is established isn’t just by form but through the use of surveyors, who travel the country quizzing people about everything from the number of cows and donkeys they own to “trust in neighbours” and “connection to nature”.

Among them is Amber, learning the rules and the attitude needed. “You need to conduct this survey with devotion,” he is told. That certainly seems to be something he has taken to heart as documentarians Arun Bhattarai and Dorottya Zurbó chart the course of his work alongside his colleague Guna up and down the country. The directors initially seem to be taking a purely quirky approach, watching the agents as they talk to people like a fly on the wall, while periodically inserting some of the statistics they have garnered.

As the film runs on, however, it gathers weight in terms of its central theme concerning happiness. One of the reasons for this is that Amber himself becomes part of the story. We watch him carefully taking care of his mother in his off hours, while also trying his luck at romance. His unsettled status in the country also emerges as he faces challenges due to his Nepali ethnicity, which saw his citizenship revoked as a child after the death of his father - now we see him crafting letters in a bid to restore it. As we see him embark on a tentative relationship with Sarita, the selfies they take are a reminder of the way that we all construct these sorts of moments of perceived and recorded happiness in our own lives.

As the surveys continue, different ideas of happiness emerge along with moments of shared humanity. When an elderly man says, “Now there is construction everywhere”, as the camera pans to little more than fields and mountains, he could be speaking for NIMBYs the world over. Bhattarai and Zurbó are interested in digging deeper. We may meet various interviewees via Amber and Guna but they stick with many of them afterwards.

In one family we learn how a man’s multiple wives have “found happiness in each other” despite the fact he’s evidently a dead loss. Meanwhile, in a city, we’ll meet the transgender Dechen whose livestock ownership rests at nil and whose life doesn’t fit neatly into the boxes of the survey. The chorus of voices allows the positives and negatives of the Bhutanese approach to emerge, while also challenging us to consider our own internal tick boxes to “happiness”. Amber’s you-only-live-once generally upbeat approach, meanwhile, comes as a reminder that there’s joy in taking action no matter what.