WATCHING Agent of Happiness (Cert. 12A) brought to mind Basil Fawlty’s denial of seeming so. “Oh happy. Yes, I remember that. . . I’ll report it if it happens.” In contrast, this Bhutanese documentary suggests such a state of being is far from elusive: 93.6 per cent of the population is happy, a 3.3-per-cent increase on the previous year.
Bhutan’s constitutional monarch devised Gross National Happiness (GNH) 50 years ago to reconcile ethnic conflicts. It was hoped that promoting personal satisfaction would reset citizens’ aspirations. One agent, Amber, scours the Himalayas with 148 questions in nine categories. It is an official expectation that people accentuate the positive. We’re fortunate, one interviewee says, to live where we do in the Land of the Thunder Dragon. Public signposts encourage Sincerity, Mindfulness, Resilience, Timelessness, etc. Over the radio, a song proclaims “Our gods look after us.”
A young woman rates her happiness as ten because a calf was born yesterday, meaning that she will have milk to sell. Amber and colleague reduce that to eight. A high sense of karma is recognised, but decree four for her living standard. They don’t seem to take into account that poor material conditions may not always affect a benevolent disposition adversely. Amber, now 40, tends his ailing mother, though longing for marriage. Bhutanese-born, he lacks citizenship, and this prevents his getting better employment. His GNH is high on acceptance, low on loneliness.
There’s a nagging feeling that Arun Bhattarai and Dorottya Zurbós’s film imparts a feeling of passivity and fatalism, reinforced by Buddhism, playing a significant part in residents’ well-being self-assessments. A mother with cancer has a son who is a trans exotic dancer. Fearing past bad karma will affect her “daughter”, she avails herself of the Three Jewels of Tibetan Buddhism in praying for them to be protected from the Evil Eye.
A student-age girl wonders why in a beautiful village blessed by the gods she is such a sad soul. Beset by alcoholic and violent parents, she yearns for normal family life. Not everyone we meet is so dispirited by their problems. A widower may fret that he hasn’t prayed for his wife sufficiently. He remedies this, however, by planting numerous prayer flags. The sound of them flapping in the wind will let her soul pass to the dead. A teenage boy with a strong consciousness of belonging, forgiveness, and satisfaction receives a happiness score of nine.
Agent of Happiness serves in many ways as a companion piece to the acclaimed 2019 Bhutanese feature film Lunana: A yak in the classroom. Set in a tiny, remote village, it is pretty much all sweetness and light, despite unreliable electricity, no signal for mobile phones, and not even a blackboard.
The documentary, surveying a larger area, paints a more varied mixture of joy and woe. It suggests that happiness is not omnipresent in many lives and that Basil Fawlty wasn’t so wide of the mark. Being resigned to one’s condition and just settling for what individually and collectively they already experience falls short of the life-changing potential of, say, the Sermon on the Mount, which locates moments of happiness in seeking righteousness and peace, as well as in enduring pain.