It is shown that the Villain model of two-component spins over two dimensional lattices exhibits slow, non-summable, decay of correlations at any temperature at which the dual integer-valued Gaussian field exhibits depinning. For the latter, we extend the recent proof by P. Lammers of the existence of a depinning transition in the integervalued Gaussian field in two-dimensional graphs of degree three to all doubly-periodic graphs, in particular to Z 2 . Taken together these two statements yield a new perspective on the Berezinskii-Kosterlitz-Thouless phase transition in the Villain model, and complete a new proof of depinning in two-dimensional integer-valued height functions.