One has learned to temper one’s expectations when settling in to watch any Palme d’Or winner from the Cannes Film Festival over the years. One has.

A “best picture” honor selected by an ever-changing jury of filmmaking peers from all over the world, the politics and peer review that tends, often as not, to honor obscurity and/or indulgence make one leery of that “Palme d’Or Winner” label.

“Wild at Heart,” “Eternity and a Day,” “The Tree of Life,””The Birds, the Bees and the Italians” and “The Square” anyone?

The best I typically hope for from your average Palme d’Or winner is “I don’t mind the way it passes the time.”

One has to generally set a lot of time aside for any Wim Wenders film, seeing as how he tried to get a five hour cut of “Until the End of the World” into theaters (he didn’t) among other abuses of the clock. So “Paris, Texas” also has that weighing into my years of skipping past it.

But Wenders’ leisurely 1984 meditation on the American landscape, toxic relationships and the profound pull of love has been newly-restored. It’s the movie that “made” veteran bit player Harry Dean Stanton into an indie icon and is also memorable for a great supporting performance by Nastassja Kinski.

So problematic and dated gender politics aside, its famously indulgent twenty minute duel monologues climax and that Palme d’Or caveat emptor be damned. It must be seen, if only for the lonesome Sam Shephard screenplay and the striking way Curaçao native Robby Müller (“Breaking the Waves”) filmed grand Western vistas and the seedy and sandy side of Texas.

Our silent protagonist (Stanton) emerges from the wilderness in a red cap, sunburned beard, shoes worn down to sandals and a suit that was last fashionable in the ’50s and last cleaned not long after that.

He faints in a roadside/desert edge Terlingua, Texas bar, and the only ID the brusque, stogey-smoking German Mennonite doctor (Bernhard Wicki) can find on him is a business card with a California phone number.

That’s how Walt Henderson (Dean Stockwell) learns his brother Travis isn’t dead. Four years missing, four years in the wilderness when even Jesus limited himself to just 40 days, Walt is shocked. But he flies in and navigates his way to remote Terlingua in that pre-GPS stone age. Even he can’t get Travis to talk, or to stop walking off every chance he gets.

Walt eventually gets the never-flown/never-will Travis home to L.A. where the wandering brother gets requainted with Walt’s wife (Aurore Clément) and with their son. But Hunter (Hunter Carson) is actually Travis’ son.

As Travis starts talking and sounding more rational and the kid adjusts to his presence, Travis resolves to do something that might explain why he took his sojourn in the wilderness. He and Hunter will load up his old Ford Ranchero and track down the lad’s mom.

We’ve seen a hundred years of films shot and set in Texas and the Southwest. But Wenders and Müller focus on the downmarket grit underneath the endless, often cloudless horizon. There’s beauty in worn out cantinas and antiquated motor hotel bungalows, in seedy peep-show businesses and in the weathered people you sometimes see in them.

Who knows how many safety-on-set rules Wenders broke by having the kid and the star talk by walkie talkie while the star is driving that ’59 Ford on the expressway and the kid is walking around in the open bed in the back of the Ranchero, with a camaraman filming them?

When Travis and a peep-show sex-worker (Kinski) have their long talk, Müller manages one of the most beautiful shots in cinema history, having the two separated by light-reflecting glass with her head seen through the window with Stanton’s face reflected where hers should be.

“Paris, Texas” takes its bittersweet time to wander through Shepard’s lean but stretched-out narrative. The mismatched in age/appearance couples are hard to accept, the stakes are low and the surprises not terribly surprising. The anecdote-heavy dialogue is more long-winded and laconic than pithy and quotable.

“I wanted to see him so bad that I didn’t even dare imagine him anymore.”

But Kinski is a marvel, giving much of her performance as a simple reaction to the words she’s hearing from the customer on the other side of that glass partition.

And Stanton, given a soulful role after decades of bit parts on TV and in movies such as “Cool Hand Luke,” “Kelly’s Heroes” and “Straight Time,” was able to surf much of the rest of his career on the cool cachet that “Repo Man,” “Paris, Texas” and being a favorite of David Lynch gave him.

Is “Paris, Texas” better than John Huston’s “Under the Volcano,” the iconic Irish drama “Cal” or Satyajit Ray’s “The Home and the World,” films it was in competition at Cannes that year? Not really. But Wenders makes his meandering meditation do more than just pass the time. Stanton and in the last act Kinski make it compelling.

It’s a classic that reimagines the West and Texas and the sort of people who live in it in original ways that only a playwright with an ear for silences and speeches, a foreign filmmaker with a great eye and a cinematographer who shares that vision might manage.

Rating: R, nudity, sexual content, profanity

Cast: Harry Dean Stanton, Dean Stockwell, Aurore Clément, Hunter Carson and Nastassja Kinski.

Credits: Directed by Wim Wenders, scripted by Sam Shepard and L.M. Kit Carson. A Janus Films/Criterion release on Tubi, Roku, Plex, other streamers.

Running time: 2:25