Agent of Happiness: gentle documentary explores the question – can joy be quantified?

If the average westerner were to classify those key issues contributing to their overall happiness, Work/Life Balance would probably figure. But, how about Sense of Karma? Number of Cows? Highly unlikely. But in Bhutan, the small, landlocked, Himalayan country that actually sets out to calculate its citizens’ contentment on a quantifiable index, such beliefs and lifestyle factors are taken very seriously. Where other nations focus on the bottom line of Gross Domestic Product, Bhutan has long promoted, even officially instituted, Gross National Happiness as a priority for its population.  

Those government officials tasked with going door-to-door to put this survey (148 questions across 9 categories) to the Bhutanese people, are the subject of this new documentary. In particular, we follow Amber Kumar Gurung, a sweet-natured forty-year-old, who lives with his elderly mother. It’s a central irony of the film that, as he listens to most of his fellow countrymen and women humbly attest to lives of good fortune and gratitude, we hear him wistfully confide that “happiness comes from the heart.” Amber has a good job and a car, but no wife. Amber is still very much searching for his own happy ending.

The humility of those Amber and his colleagues poll is reflected in the restrained, observational style of Bhutanese / Hungarian co-directors Arun Bhattarai & Dorottya Zurbó. There’s no dissent or questioning the potentially propagandist concept of publicly measuring one’s happiness; tellingly, every single person profiled here comes from a modest, often rural background. For a people famously devoted to their King, still an important figurehead post-2008’s shift from monarchy to democracy, there’s a sense that declaring unhappiness would be tantamount to disloyalty. But exploring this tension isn’t something that the film seems to factor enough into its own calculations.

That said, Bhattarai and Zurbó do frequently shoot exteriors and interviews side-on and slightly removed, thus perhaps obliquely commenting on GNH’s somewhat two-dimensional, point-scoring model. And the film is alive to some of the country’s more striking contradictions: a horse and carriage trotting alongside cars on the highway; or appraising a farmer’s GNH score on a smartphone.

What gradually emerges, then, is a fascinating way of considering happiness. For almost everyone here, it’s a present-tense assessment: for example, the woman whose cow just birthed a calf, meaning milk production, meaning more money earned, and her current joyful state. For those of us burdened with continually questioning spiritual well-being as an over-arching, almost-Sisyphean, existential condition, it’s a salient reminder of living in the moment, statistics be damned. 

 ► Agent of Happiness is in UK cinemas now.